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

For Lecture 3 as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy, Turner prepared Diagram 33 demonstrating procedures for drawing a perspective representation of a cube set out by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola (1507–1573) in the posthumous Le due regole della prospettiva pratica (1583). For his general understanding of Vignola’s approach, Turner relied on John Joshua Kirby’s Dr Brook Taylor’s Method of Perspective made Easy, both in Theory and in Practice (1765, II, pp.61–2; diagram XIX, fig.1), of which he owned a copy that had come to him from his friend Henry Scott Trimmer, a descendant of the author. Early notes on Vignola and a sketch copied from Kirby can be found in the Windmill and Lock sketchbook (Tate D07979, D07976; Turner Bequest CXIV 13 verso, 12). Maurice Davies writes that Turner’s description in Lecture 3 is unusually clear and gives a better impression than did Kirby of Vignola’s overall strategy.1

Technical notes:

Peter Bower states that the sheet is Double Elephant size Whatman paper made by William Balston, at Springfield Mill, Maidstone, Kent. The largest group within the perspective drawings, this batch of paper shows a ‘grid-like series of shadows that can be seen within the sheet in transmitted light. This appears to have been caused by a trial method of supporting the woven wire mould cover on the mould’. Because this is the only batch he has seen with such a feature, Bower believes that ‘it may have been tried on one pair of moulds and for some reason never tried again’. He also writes that it is ‘not the best Whatman paper by any means; the weight of this group is also very variable and the moulds have not been kept clean during use’.1

Verso:

Blank, save for an inscription by an unknown hand in pencil ‘79’ bottom left.