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

Turner’s assorted sketches and inscriptions fill this page. In the upper section (inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation) is an unidentified building, possibly with a portico to the left. The lower sketch appears to be inverted relative to the building above, although the correct orientation of the zigzagging lines and markings is difficult to establish, and so too is the subject depicted. In the left margin, descending vertically, is a largely illegible pencil inscription by Turner, which Finberg tentatively read as ‘Sansbartoli (?), Part of the Pitti’.1 If so, this could possibly refer to an image of Florence’s Palazzo Pitti by the painter and engraver Pietro Santi Bartoli (1635–1700). Turner had drawn a small view of the palace in the 1819 Rome and Florence sketchbook (Tate D16574; Turner Bequest CXCI 52a).

Written in ink at the centre of the page, upside down in relation to the first subject described above, is the customary endorsement by the Executors of the Turner Bequest, signed in this case by Revd Henry Scott Trimmer and the engraver Charles Turner; it reads: ‘No 218 | 44 Pencil Sketches | H. S. Trimmer | C. Turner’. Inscribed in pencil immediately beside this note, in the outer margin, are the initials of the two assessors, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake and John Prescott Knight: ‘C.L.E.’ and ‘JPK’.

Technical notes:

There is a strong possibility that the covers to this sketchbook were rebound in the wrong way during twentieth-century restoration, likely at the same time as blank free endpapers were added (see the book’s overall technical notes), and that the present paste-down would have originally appeared at the back of the sketchbook, rather than at the front, as it currently sits. If this were the case, the present page would have faced folio 66 verso (D21972), the subject of which Ian Warrell identified as Shoreham in Sussex.1 The zigzagging lines shown here could in this case represent a coastal structure, such as a jetty.