J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

A hunched human figure and a mass of trees are the only discernible subjects in this hastily executed study. The subject is too vague to be conclusively linked to any of Turner’s finished vignette illustrations, however, the work is one of a group of more than thirty watercolour studies in the Turner Bequest that appear to be preparatory sketches for Campbell’s Poetical Works. They are all painted on cheap, lightweight paper and executed in a rough, loose style.

The study can also be linked to another sketch (see Tate D27583; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 66), tentatively identified by David Blayney Brown as preliminary design for A Tempest (Tate D27719; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 202), a vignette illustration which Turner designed for Rogers’s Poems (1834). This watercolour shares the same palette and painting style and it is therefore possible that it is related.

The work was once part of a parcel of studies described by John Ruskin as ‘A.B. 40. PO. Vignette beginnings, once on a roll. Worthless’.1 For an explanation of his meaning of ‘once on a roll’ see the technical notes above. Finberg records how Ruskin later described his phrasing in a letter to Ralph Nicholson Wornum as ‘horrible’, adding ‘I never meant it to be permanent’.2

Technical notes:
Peter Bower has noted that this study is made on off-white low-grade machine-made cartridge paper. The maker is unknown and there is no watermark. This paper would have been relatively cheap to buy and could have been purchased from a colourman, cut off from a roll to the desired size. Turner has used the ‘felt’ side of the paper which has slightly more texture than the ‘wire’ side, allowing better adhesion of pigment and graphite to the surface of the sheet. Many of Turner’s vignette studies were made on a similar grade of machine-made paper, and the artist employed the ‘felt’ side on all of them.1

Verso:

Inscribed by an unknown hand in pencil ‘AB 40 P | O’ bottom right