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

Turner’s use of this page is somewhat complex. At the outer edge, with the page turned vertically, he has inscribed the following in pencil:

Parallel with the gutter there is a list of words, perhaps names or place names, but only a few letters are legible here and there, such as ‘W’ at the end of a line near the top and ‘R’ or ‘B’ towards the bottom. This is largely because, as set out in the Introduction, this is one of numerous pages in the first third of the sketchbook with rough watercolour washes, worked into compositions to varying degrees. As with others, this may be intended as a dark interior with hangings or a curtained bed. Parts of the darkest area have been manipulated or lifted to leave vague, pale forms which might imply a human presence.

Inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation at the gutter, there appears to be a slight continuation of the crenellations from folio 7 verso opposite (D27737), where the King’s Entrance porch with its flanking screen, formerly at the south-west corner of the old Houses of Parliament complex, is recorded. There is a separate sketch of two storeys of a tower or part of a building, also inverted, at the middle of the top edge; it is rubbed and disrupted by the watercolour, but was presumably another structure at or adjacent to Parliament, which Turner drew in the aftermath of the fire of October 1834 (see the Introduction). This would imply that the washes throughout the book cannot predate that event.