This sheet features a lively watercolour sketch of clouds billowing over a body of water, possibly the sea. Darker, heavier clouds gather in the upper right of the composition, casting an ominous shadow over the water below them.
A series of long straight pencil marks visible on the right-hand side of the page suggest that Turner painted this watercolour study over an abandoned pencil sketch. From the few lines that are present, it appears to be a representation of an interior, possibly one of the rooms at 45 Grosvenor Place, the London home of Turner’s friend and patron, Walter Fawkes; for a more extensive interior study, see the verso (
D12527).
There is the possibility, then, that all of the sketches in pencil in this sketchbook might pre-date the watercolour studies, with Turner commandeering the sketchbook to produce watercolour studies of the sky some time after producing his sketches of Fawkes’s home, the Fourth of June at Eton College, and Windsor Castle from Salt Hill. If this is the case, then perhaps the sketchbook has in fact been foliated in the wrong order, with the recto and verso of the present page actually being the first sketches that Turner produced before he inverted the sketchbook at a later date and filled the remaining pages with watercolour sketches.
