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

This page and folio 10 recto (D15261) have both been treated with broadly brushed but carefully controlled horizontal washes of pale colours suggesting a generic scene of a calm sea with an open horizon below a pale sky, with a strip of beach or shoreline in the foreground. They and the more varied and dynamic beach scenes on folios 12 recto and 13 recto (D15263–D15264) are of the type Finberg called ‘colour beginnings’, among which are the best known are the separate sheets in Turner Bequest section CCLXIII;1 for a discussion of the function of such works in general, see the Introduction to the ‘England and Wales Colour Studies c.1825–39’ section.2

Finberg used the same undifferentiated description for all four of the pages here: ‘Commencement of a water colour drawing’.3 Martin Butlin has described the use of ‘basic colours representing the foreground, distance and sky, of a kind that may have been the starting-out point for some of the other sketches’, meaning the watercolours of Lake Como, Milan and Venice earlier in the sketchbook (see the Introduction), which share horizontal colour structures, developed and articulated by elements of landscape and architecture.4 Butlin and Evelyn Joll have pointed out similarities with an undeveloped Landscape Composition in oils (Tate N05523),5 and a page from the Rome: Colour Studies sketchbook, used on the present tour (Tate D16385; Turner Bequest CLXXXIX 55), with bands of colour applied on a page previously treated with a pale grey wash.6 Compare the more ‘abstract’ of the ‘colour beginnings’, gathered in the ‘Colour Studies of Clear or Hazy Skies’ category of the ‘Colour Studies of the Sun, Skies and Clouds c.1815–45’ section of this catalogue, in particular Tate D17180, D40303–D40304 and D25254 (Turner Bequest CXCVI P1, P2, P3, CCLXIII 138).

Eric Shanes has compared this page, ‘the most sensitive and subtle in colouring’ of the undeveloped ‘colour beginnings’ in this sketchbook, with D15256 (Turner Bequest CLXXXI 6), a comparatively conventional topographical rendering of the Dogana and Bacino in Venice, pointing out that under ‘the representation of buildings and boats ... may easily be apprehended a band of diffused colours that is very similar’ to this one.7 See also under D15261 for Michael Bockemühl’s observations about that work’s fundamental similarities to another of the Venice subjects.

Verso:

Blank; there is some slight watercolour offsetting from folio 12 recto opposite (D15263).