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

This book and its companion, the On a Lee Shore (2), were apparently made up by Turner himself, by folding larger sheets of white wove paper which he had previously prepared with an even grey-blue wash, tearing them carefully along a straight edge, and sewing them into covers. He had practised this expedient at an early age: his first surviving sketchbook, the Oxford book (Tate; Turner Bequest II) of about 1788–9, is similarly home-made. He was later to use torn-up sheets of paper frequently on his tours of the Continent in the 1830s.6

Finberg recorded that this first book of the pair possessed ‘covers’, but does not describe them, only noting the parchment label which was subsequently transferred to the folded pages themselves, pasted to folio 1 recto (D03974) and the verso of folio 8 (D03984). ⁷ They may have been simply slightly thicker sheets of grey laid card, as is the case with the On the Cliffs sketchbook, of similar size and date (Tate; Turner Bequest LXIV). The second book seems to have lost at an early date any covers it may have had, but it is possible that neither book ever had a true cover; the fact that the Trustees signed their names on the verso of the existing folio 1 of each (D03974 in this case) argues against there having been any alternative clear space on which to write. The similarly made-up Cows sketchbook (Tate; Turner Bequest LXII) seems not to have had a cover.

Both this book and On a Lee Shore (2) have single sheets of paper incorporated into their modern fly-leaves which were kept with the books from the 1940s, noting requests by students in the British Museum Print Room to handle them, in most instances on the same occasions. In this case the following is inscribed in black ink: ‘LXVII. Seen by students on the following dates:’; and in pencil: ‘A.O. Popham 30. iv. 47 | K. B. Critchlow 10^th October 1958. | K.B. Critchlow 16 Sept 1961. | J S Gage 22 Feb. 1963 | F.R. Heathcote. 7/9/66. | G. Wilkinson 7/4/71 | R. Guillaume 7/8/72 | G. Christeller 4/10/72 | M. Munsterberg 4/12/77 | [?Ch Putny] 30/10/82’ . The last name is in reverse.

Among the names here are: ‘A.O. Popham’, perhaps Arthur Ewart Popham, Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings from 1945 to 1954 (where the works on paper in the Turner Bequest were kept following the Thames flood of January 1928 until 1986) or his daughter,8 the art historian and editor Anne Olivier Popham (Mrs Quentin Bell from 1952), the subject of a 1937–8 portrait by the Euston Road School artist Graham Bell (Tate N05461); ‘K.B. Critchlow’, presumably the artist and author Keith Barry Critchlow (born 1933); John Stephen Gage (1938–2012), author of Colour in Turner (1969) and other works on the artist; Gerald Wilkinson, who published selections from the drawings in the Turner Bequest in three volumes in 1972–5;9 and Marjorie Munsterberg, whose 1979 PhD thesis was on the ‘Development of Turner’s Critical Reputation between 1800 and 1819’ (Columbia University, New York).10 The final name in both lists is rather oddly given in mirror-writing; it may be that of the drawings dealer Christopher Powney, then based in London.