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

This diagram illustrates a method for drawing a cube by the English painter and writer Joseph Highmore (1692–1780). Turner owned a copy of Highmore’s The Practice of Perspective, on the Principles of Dr Brook Taylor (1763), and used his diagram and description as the basis for his lecture material.1 Turner’s diagram was most likely used to supplement already existing lecture material when further examples of perspective were required. It corresponds to a section of Turner’s lecture manuscripts describing a wide variety of methods of perspective, which Maurice Davies believes to be the late, extended version of Turner’s history of techniques found in Lecture 3.2

Technical notes:

Peter Bower writes that the sheet is Imperial size Whatman paper made by Finch and Thomas Robert Hollingworth, at Turkey Mill, Maidstone, Kent. Bower notes: ‘This paper is very heavily sized and bears some relationship to the Parchment Substitute papers produced by various hand made papermakers in the nineteenth century (and into the twentieth) for legal documents. Sometimes papermakers don’t quite keep up their quality control. In the case of this particular sheet [and about nine others from the same batch that Turner also used for diagrams] the mould has been left, probably over night, without being cleaned and small amounts of pulp have dried between the support bars under the mould cover and the two layers of woven wire making up the cover. This affects the drainage of the sheet during formation and leaves a clear impression of the mould’s actual structure and construction’.1

Verso:

Blank, save for an inscription by an unknown hand in pencil ‘45’ bottom left.