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

This loosely washed page suggests the dark space between the curtains of a bed, as on many adjacent pages, but the presence of a figure or figures within cannot confidently be suggested in this case. Some of the forms of the initial washes were offset to or from folio 25 recto opposite (D28818), and Raphael Rosenberg has given this as an example of Klecksography, or drawings generated by random smudging, in this case starting from a sort of proto-Rorschach mirror image, perhaps generated unintentionally1 (see the overall Introduction to the present grouping).

For a wider discussion of the improvisatory and often erotic nature of the watercolour studies making up most of this sketchbook, see elsewhere in the Introduction.

The unaccessioned recto is inscribed in red ink ‘24’ and stamped in black ‘CCXCI(b) – 24’, and is blank save for slight offsetting of adventitious watercolour to or from folio 23 verso (itself unaccessioned, the recto being D28815).