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

Apparently as part of a new campaign of cataloguing after the Turner Bequest drawings were transferred to the British Museum following the Tate flood of 1928, the Turner scholar C.F. Bell compiled four pages of MS notes which have been tipped into a British Museum copy of Finberg’s 1909 Inventory of the Bequest now held at Tate Britain,13 describing the Cornwall and Devon and Stonehenge sketchbooks as respectively ‘CXXV^a’ and ‘CXXV^B’, and calling them both ‘Sk. Bk. S.122’.14 His introductory notes on the section headed ‘Stonehenge Sketch Book’ are as follows: ‘Not properly speaking a sketch book, loose leaves of white writing-paper, possibly at one time stitched together. The former pagination does not seem to be original and has been abandoned.’15

Bell does not describe the book’s present plain card covers, nor does he note the pages’ dimensions. The leaves appear to have been trimmed flush with the covers in the process of binding at a later date. Glue stains are evident on the backs of all the sheets (and also on those in the Cornwall and Devon sketchbook), bleeding off at some corners and apparently trimmed away altogether at others; pencil numbers on the versos have also been partly cut off in many cases. One similar number in the Cornwall and Devon book is initialled ‘E.F.’, suggesting that they are all in the hand of Edwin Fagg, the Tate Gallery’s Official Lecturer, who had supervised immediate restoration work and compiled the damage report after the 1928 Tate flood.16 It is possible that these drawings came to light at that time. The numbers’ significance is unclear, but they are of the complex type that John Ruskin sometimes used without explanation in his early cataloguing work on the Bequest. They may originally have been applied by him, following his own system or indicating a previous location or sequence (for which see further discussion below), and copied by Fagg.

What seems to be an original Turner Bequest schedule number noted by Bell, ‘S.122’, does not appear in Finberg’s 1909 appendix ‘List of Sketch Books Arranged according to the Old Schedule Numbers’, suggesting that it was one of the ‘parcels of loose miscellaneous drawings which have now been rearranged according to subjects and dates’.17 However, as noted above, Finberg did not record these particular sheets in 1909, but he was aware of the Cornwall and Devon sketchbook by 1929, soon after the flood, when he referred briefly to ‘the “North Devon” Sketch Book, Turner Bequest, CXXV (a)’.18 He continued to work on Turner until his death in 1939, and produced an independent, undated, two-page manuscript listing of this and the Cornwall and Devon sketchbook,19 ‘only produced after my Invty. was printed’,20 which is tipped into a copy of his published Inventory held at Tate Britain and headed ‘CXXV(b). Stonehenge Book. | 8 7/8 x 7 1/4.’21

All the sheets have glue stains and sometimes slight abrasions at their corners, indicating previous mounting, and all are slightly wrinkled in a similar way, as if exposed to damp, as discussed below. As late as 1974, in one of his illustrated selections from the Bequest, Gerald Wilkinson noted (as had Bell) that this and the Cornwall and Devon book ‘cannot be called sketchbooks since they are all separate sheets.’22 Wilkinson reproduces photographs carefully trimmed to show what appear to be loose sheets with slightly irregular edges. The process of tipping in, binding, trimming and casing as a ‘sketchbook’ therefore appears to postdate 1974. The pages are attached to custom-made stubs. The longer dimension of each sheet is always therefore 222 mm, but the shorter varies between 180 and 183 mm, depending on where the original sheets were mounted on their stubs before the page block was trimmed slightly.

It is possible if not probable that the drawings here and in the Cornwall and Devon sketchbook were once kept in a large (350 x 285 x 50 mm) brown, leather-bound, gold-tooled album stamped ‘SKETCHES’ in gold on a red label on the spine (Tate). It contains 167 intact leaves of relatively coarse, speckled paper (340 x 270 mm), which are wrinkled and sometimes damp-stained at their yellow-tinted edges, and alternate with neat stubs. There are small paper tabs attached at intervals at the bottom left of pages and stubs with letters in ink giving an ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ sequence, perhaps indicating an intended function as a ledger or index. Paper conservator Helen Evans assumes that the stubs were ‘part of the original structure of the book’, with only ‘a handful’ ‘more roughly cut, suggesting that sheets have been removed’,23 while the tabs were ‘added later by the owner to adapt the book for use’.24 Incidentally, she has detected what appear to be white chalk markings on a few pages made ‘with a definite sweeping movement suggesting that they were drawn by hand’, but without creating ‘any identifiable images’.25

Inside the front cover of this album is the Turner Bequest executors’ note, in ink at the top: ‘N^o 378 | 102 pencil sketches – loose | 2 in pen and ink – | 2 in colour | 106 in all H.S Trimmer’, endorsed by Charles Eastlake and J.P. Knight with their initials ‘C.L.E.’ and ‘JPK’ in pencil, each side of the usual blind-stamped Turner Bequest monogram. Below this John Ruskin has written in pencil ‘The drawings in this book were spoiling. | They are put up in two parcels, marked | 378.A. 378.B. | J Ruskin. 1862’. Below this in turn Finberg has written in pencil: ‘I have been carefully through all the | boxes & can find no parcels marked 378A & 378B. | What has become of these drawings? | AJ.F. 7 July 1905.’

Attached to the first folio is a grubby sheet of paper inscribed by John Ruskin in ink ‘12 Books. | (Including those of loose sheets) | Left out as examples’. At 228 x 190 mm, the sheet is close in size to the pages in the present sketchbook. The combined total of leaves with pencil drawings in this and the Devon and Cornwall sketchbook (less the two additional leaves now incorporated into the latter) is 103, which seems too close to Trimmer’s ‘106’ be a coincidence; however, if these indeed form the main body of the drawings in question, any associated ink or watercolour studies have yet to be identified. Helen Evans has noted:

This cockling and the slight wrinkling of the sketchbook’s leaves as described above may therefore indicate their formerly being placed in the album.

C.F. Bell’s pencil numbering of each leaf, corresponding to his MS catalogue, provided the suffixes of the sequence of stamped ‘CXXV.B’ pseudo-Finberg numbers, and this order was followed when the leaves were later bound, with the then unidentified but clearly related Cheddar views first, followed by those of Stonehenge. The order in which the drawings were made at each of the sites remains a matter for speculation. Bell’s numbering was not followed by Finberg in his MS notes, as he instead used the lower of the two existing numbers inscribed on the verso of each leaf, for example folio 1 recto (D41374; CXXV b 1) is Bell’s page ‘1’, but Finberg’s page ‘9’, taken from the ‘213 | 9’ inscribed on the back (for the single exception see the entry for folio 4 recto; D41377). As there is no readily discernible significance in these sequences, a concordance is not provided here.