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

The main inscription is that of Turner’s executors, with the book’s original schedule number endorsed by Henry Scott Trimmer, John Prescott Knight, Charles Lock Eastlake and Charles Turner, at the bottom right, starting in ink: ‘No 197 This book contains | 20 leaves. Pencil drawings. | H.S. Trimmer’; then initialled ‘JPK’ and ‘C.L.E.’ to the left below in pencil; and ‘CTurner’ to the right below in ink. A later page, D09009 (CXXVII 31), is similarly inscribed by the executors, but as ‘N^o 148’.

The specific subject is unidentified, but the landscape appears characteristic of the Lake District, in what is now Cumbria. Views of Millom Castle, Cumbria, elsewhere in this sketchbook are datable to 1809 (see under D08975; CXXVII 9); assuming the identification is correct, the present study would presumably have been made on the same tour. Other possible Cumbrian subjects are D08969, D08979 and D09016 (CXXVII 5, 12, 37).

There is an ink stroke on the verso (D41530) which appears to be the abandoned beginning of a study for Sandycombe Lodge.

Technical notes:

This page is a face of one of the loose bifolio sheets which form the majority of the so-called Sandycombe and Yorkshire sketchbook, along with a few single leaves. The sheets were not bound, but folded inside each other in a sequence which is not entirely recoverable (see the sketchbook’s Introduction for a suggested order). When unfolded, this page is continuous with D09003 (CXXVII 26a); the measurements given above are for the present work alone.

There is offsetting from Ruskin’s red ink ‘2’ inscribed in the corresponding position on D08966 (CXXVII 2), which has bled through to the present page.