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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Autumn Tour of Northern France 1845 > Dieppe and Kent Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner A Line of Cliffs; Studies of a Woman's Genitalia 1845

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Line of Cliffs; Studies of a Woman's Genitalia’ 1845
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 2 Recto:
A Line of Cliffs; Studies of a Woman’s Genitalia 1845
D35489
Turner Bequest CCCLXI 2
Pencil on white wove paper, 111 x 86 mm
Partial watermark ‘W’
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘2’ top right, ascending vertically
Stamped in black ‘CCCLXI – 2’ top right, ascending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the page turned vertically, at the outer edge is a distant view of cliffs, presumably on a Channel coast, above a horizon line possibly drawn using a straight edge which seems to have slipped towards the left. See the sketchbook’s Introduction for the many slight coastal views scattered through it.
Perhaps in anticipation of another coastal study, there is a second line in parallel below, although this overlaps with one of three successive, related diagrammatic studies made with the page turned the other way, which ‘seem to show the folds of a vagina’, as Ian Warrell has noted.1 James Hamilton has observed of Turner that ‘at seventy his creative sexual appetite did not desert him; there are drawings of female genitalia and copulation’2 in this sketchbook, the latter being on folio 5 recto (D35495). There are occasional comparable examples of this erotic visual synecdoche among the landscapes in Turner’s later sketchbooks; compare three drawings in the Rhine (between Cologne and Mayence) also Moselle and Aix-la-Chapelle sketchbook of about 1834 or later (Tate D28720, D28722, D28723; Turner Bequest CCXCI a 33a, 34a, 35).
1
Warrell 2003, p.43.
2
Hamilton 1997, p.301.
Technical notes:
The whole page has darkened, possibly as a result of water damage in the 1928 Tate flood.

Matthew Imms
September 2016

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘A Line of Cliffs; Studies of a Woman’s Genitalia 1845 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2016, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2016, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-a-line-of-cliffs-studies-of-a-womans-genitalia-r1183914, accessed 03 July 2024.