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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > West Country 1811 > Devonshire Coast, No.1 Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Inscriptions by Turner: Calculations; with a Grotesque Head, Perhaps Personifying Jealousy 1811

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Inscriptions by Turner: Calculations; with a Grotesque Head, Perhaps Personifying Jealousy’ 1811 (Inside front cover of sketchbook)
Inside front cover of sketchbook
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Inside Front Cover:
Inscriptions by Turner: Calculations; with a Grotesque Head, Perhaps Personifying Jealousy 1811
D40903
Pencil on white laid paper, 117 x 75 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil (see main catalogue entry)
Inscribed by later hands in pencil and ink (see main catalogue entry)
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram above centre
Inscribed in pencil ‘CXXIII’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CXXIII’ top left
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This slight sketch of a sheepish-looking man’s – or devil’s – head with a shallow forehead and apparently pointed ears seen full-face, is presumably imaginary or a caricature. An inscription immediately opposite, on folio 1 recto (D08362), may read ‘Jealousy’. The face is inverted in relation to the foliated sequence of the book.
There are also scattered calculations and jotted figures, made when the page was turned sideways with the gutter at its foot and overlapping with the drawing in places. They are faint, and partly obscured by the most prominent inscription, that of Turner’s executors, with the book’s original schedule number endorsed by Henry Scott Trimmer, John Prescott Knight and Charles Lock Eastlake, starting from the top of the page in ink, ‘No 369 | 147 leaves of | pencil sketches | H S Trimmer’, and initialled in pencil ‘JPK’ and ‘C.L.E’ below, towards the centre right. The figure ‘147’ is difficult to make out, and the ink must have spread on the absorbent paper immediately, as Trimmer has reiterated in ink below the initials: ‘147. leaves’.

Matthew Imms
June 2011

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Inscriptions by Turner: Calculations; with a Grotesque Head, Perhaps Personifying Jealousy 1811 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2011, 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-inscriptions-by-turner-calculations-with-a-grotesque-head-r1136837, accessed 21 November 2024.