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

This economical but evocative study is ambiguous both as to its setting and the time of day it depicts, respectively whether sea or land and dawn or dusk. Finberg called it simply ‘The pink sky’,1 while the darkening towards the slightly convex horizon and the possibly fortuitous strokes above it at the right suggest rising ground with silhouetted buildings or trees. Compare Tate D25329 (Turner Bequest CCLXIII 207).

Having been reproduced prominently in colour in the catalogue for Lawrence Gowing’s Turner: Imagination and Reality exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1966,2 which perhaps marked the high point of Turner’s being considered in a Modernist context,3 this work came to be compared with paintings by the American Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko (1903–1970), typified by symmetrical horizontal, soft-edged bands of colour (see Tate T04148, T00275, and particularly T04149). The artist is known to have admired Turner (see for example the full catalogue text for Tate T03031). The American curator John Walker suggested that the present work ‘seems to anticipate’ Rothko in its search for ‘color [sic] relationships which would have a sensual appeal’ with the ‘illustrative element ... subordinate to these chromatic harmonies.’4 Jeremy Robinson developed this theme: ‘It is so simple: sky and earth: yet so expressive. It is a pure colour sketch, with the sky and land marked simply by these two washes, resembling some of Rothko’s last paintings, which were grey and black in equal portions on vertical canvases.’5

As a rejoinder in the context of Celmins Selects Turner, a selection of relatively ‘abstract’ Turner’s alongside her own work by the American artist Vija Celmins (born 1938) at Tate Britain (May 2012–March 2013), Andrew Wilton, who has been concerned along with other Turner scholars since the 1970s to place Turner in his historical context as well as to explore his artistic development,6 noted in relation to Gowing’s 1966 selection and reproduction of this work:

In terms of being a ‘lay-in’ and the kernel of a conventional landscape, it is possible to compare Turner’s sky study with, for example, the unfinished, elemental composition of Fonthill Abbey ?from the South-West, from as early as 1799 (Tate D02187; Turner Bequest XLVII 10). Nicholas Alfrey has remarked in relation to the 2009 Turner / Rothko display at Tate Britain (re-examining the 1966 exhibition), in which the present work featured: ‘There is, finally, no significant affinity between the vigorous austerity and existential anguish of late Rothko and the confidence, energy and ... sheer optimism of Turner’s last decades.’8

Technical notes:

There is a minute hole at the bottom centre, possibly a manufacturing fault, where colour has bled through slightly to the verso.

Verso:

Blank; inscribed in pencil ‘70’ left of centre, upside down; inscribed by John Ruskin in pencil ‘AB 70 P O’ towards bottom right; inscribed in pencil ‘CCLXIII | 289’ bottom right; stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram over ‘CCLXIII – 289’ towards bottom left.

Some colour shows through the thin paper from the recto.