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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Vignette watercolours c.1826-1843 > Watercolours Related to Samuel Rogers's ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Study for 'Traitor's Gate, Tower of London', Rogers's 'Poems' c.1830-2

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Study for 'Traitor's Gate, Tower of London', Rogers's 'Poems'’ c.1830-2
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Study for ‘Traitor’s Gate, Tower of London’, Rogers’s ‘Poems’ circa 1830–2
D27610
Turner Bequest CCLXXX 93
Pencil and watercolour, approximately 130 x 145 mm on white wove paper, 190 x 240 mm
Inscribed in pencil with short ruled line at top of sheet
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘(93’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXX 93’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This is a study for the finished vignette, Traitor’s Gate (see Tate 27694; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 177) which was published in the 1834 edition of Rogers’s Poems as an illustration to the poem, ‘Human Life’. The two compositions are closely related in form and content. In the final version, however, as Ian Warrell has observed, Turner heightened the central keep of the Tower to improve the balance of the design.1
The style and medium of the sketch are typical of Turner’s preparatory studies for Rogers’s Poems, which tend to be executed in pencil and light watercolour wash and are made on papers of similar type and dimensions.
1
Warrell 1994, p.166.
Verso:
Inscribed by an unknown hand in blue pencil ‘219’ centre left

Meredith Gamer
August 2006

How to cite

Meredith Gamer, ‘Study for ‘Traitor’s Gate, Tower of London’, Rogers’s ‘Poems’ c.1830–2 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 2006, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-study-for-traitors-gate-tower-of-london-rogerss-poems-r1133350, accessed 21 November 2024.