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 and Yorkshire 1814-17 > Devonshire Rivers, No.3, and Wharfedale ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner A Dead Kingfisher 1816

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Dead Kingfisher’ 1816
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 1 Recto:
A Dead Kingfisher 1816
D09789
Turner Bequest CXXXIV 1
Pencil on white wove paper with gilt edges, 179 x 254 mm
Inscribed by Turner’s executors Henry Scott Trimmer, Charles Turner, John Prescott Knight, and Sir Charles Lock Eastlake in ink ‘No 223. [originally ‘215’, before being overwritten] | 75. Pencil sketches – | H.S. Trimmer’ top left, and ‘C Turner’ immediately below, and in pencil ‘JPK’ above and ‘C.L.E.’ below the ink inscription
Inscribed in pencil ‘223’ top left between the ink ‘223’ and Knight’s initials, and in pencil ‘CXXXIV’ top centre
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘1’ bottom right
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram above centre and again bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CXXXIV – 1’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
As Finberg noted,1 this slight sketch of a kingfisher is the basis of a finished watercolour (Leeds City Art Gallery),2 which shows the bird in the same arrangement with its feet at the top, head at the bottom and left wing spread out to the right. The beak is shown in two positions here, the firmer outline of one alternative reflecting its position in the finished design. This seems to be the only surviving pencil sketch for the watercolours made for Turner’s Yorkshire friend and patron Walter Fawkes of Farnley Hall, Yorkshire (see the sketchbook’s Introduction), for inclusion in a five-volume ‘Ornithological Collection’ from which Turner’s designs were subsequently extracted and regrouped as the ‘Book of Birds’, most of which (also now in the Leeds collection) were apparently drawn and painted directly from the specimens.3 For Farnley landscape and architectural subjects, see the entry for the verso of this leaf (D09790).
Turner’s executors’ note for this sketchbook is inscribed above the drawing. There is a large irregular patch of blue-grey watercolour on the sketchbook’s front paste-down opposite (D40879), which may be a colour test for the plumage in the related watercolour.

Matthew Imms
July 2014

1
Finberg 1909, I, p.381; see also Hill and Densley 1988, p.60; and Lyles 1988, pp.30, 39, 57, 63.
2
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.373, not numbered but listed in Introduction to section X(e); Hill and Densley 1988, p.60, reproduced in colour p.[61].
3
See Introduction to section on ‘game birds’ in Wilton 1979, p.373, Hill and Densley 1988, p.60, and Lyles 1988, pp.39, 57.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘A Dead Kingfisher 1816 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, September 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-a-dead-kingfisher-r1147345, accessed 22 November 2024.