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

The building’s chimneys and gable finials are continued ‘above’ on folio 4 verso opposite (D09673). Finberg noted1 that this sketch is the basis for the gouache Newall Old Hall of about 1815 or a little later (private collection),2 made for Turner’s friend and patron Walter Fawkes, of Farnley Hall, North Yorkshire (see the sketchbook’s Introduction for further discussion and other Yorkshire subjects in this sketchbook). There is also an unfinished, slightly larger gouache study or version (Tate D12114; Turner Bequest CLIV P); the building stood, as David Hill puts it in his entry for the latter in the present catalogue, ‘just to the east of the road from Otley to Blubberhouses, about half a mile north of Otley Bridge, and three quarters of a mile south-west of Farnley Hall’.

Both gouaches feature cattle and pigs in front of a shelter built against the middle of the façade; some very loose marks the corresponding place here may indicate their presence. Hill has noted differences in some of the features presented in D12114, as compared with the current drawing and the finished gouache, and suggests that it might date from as early as 1808, with the differences explained by building work in between. To the present writer, it seems that these differences might be more to do with artistic licence: for example, in D12114 (further to Hill’s observations), three moulded stone crenellations are clearly shown between the two projecting wings, with one rising over the central coat of arms, whereas here and in the finished drawing there are four; and the low wall running off to the left of the building is parallel with the picture plane, whereas in the other two versions it projects towards the viewer. It is perhaps unlikely that such changes, one cosmetic but nevertheless exacting and the other fairly substantial, would have been made to the dilapidated old building in the space of a few years. At any event, despite similarities at first glance, it does seem that D12114 is independent of this sketch and the finished gouache.

The doorway, inscription and flanking columns were removed and re-erected as a porch at Farnley Hall in 1814,3 where it was subsequently recorded by Turner in its new position in a slight pencil sketch in the Devonshire Rivers, No.3, and Wharfedale sketchbook (Tate D09790; Turner Bequest CXXXIV 1a) and as another gouache for Fawkes, Front Door and Porch, Farnley (private collection).4 The castellations and carved coat of arms recorded to the right of it here when in situ at Newall were repositioned above the porch. Meanwhile, Newall Old Hall went through major changes before being demolished early in the twentieth century, as noted in Hill’s entry for D12114, and the part of Farnley Hall to which the porch was attached does not survive either.

For an etching, published in 1816, showing the porch at Farnley, see under D09790 and the overall Introduction to the present grouping.

Technical notes:

There is a small brown stain at the bottom right matching one on folio 4 verso opposite (D09673) and also showing through to the verso (D09675). There are also scattered dark spots towards the top, smeared towards the top left, perhaps made accidentally when the sketch was consulted for the works mentioned above.1