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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Farnley Hall and Yorkshire c.1808-24 > Colour Studies for Subjects Commissioned ...

Colour Studies for Subjects Commissioned by Walter Fawkes c.1818–22

Turner Bequest CXCVI N, CCLXIII 142, 249, 285, 286, 288
This small grouping includes ‘colour beginnings’ for three subjects reflecting the interests of Turner’s close friend and major patron Walter Fawkes of Farnley Hall in Yorkshire (see David Hill’s overall Introduction to this section). D17178 (Turner Bequest CXCVI N) relates to a dramatic watercolour of a shipwreck, while D25264 (Turner Bequest CCLXIII 142) includes two designs for Fawkes’s albums of Ancient and Modern Chronology.
The remaining four sheets are loose variations on the landscape setting for a design to be incorporated in Fawkes’s selection of modern poetry; see under D25371 (Turner Bequest CCLXIII 249). For a discussion of the function of such colour studies in general, see the Introduction to the ‘England and Wales Colour Studies c.1825–39’ section.1
Hill’s parallel ‘Farnley and Related Subjects c.1808–24’ subsection includes slight designs for the ‘Fairfaxiana’ series (see under Tate D12100; Turner Bequest CLIV B), another of Fawkes’s personal projects on historical and natural history themes.2
1
See also Eric Shanes, ‘Beginnings’ in Evelyn Joll, Martin Butlin and Luke Herrmann (eds.), The Oxford Companion to J.M.W. Turner, Oxford 2001, pp.21–3; among many other accounts, see also Andrew Wilton in Martin Butlin, Wilton and John Gage, Turner 1775–1851, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy, London 1974, p.26; and Wilton 1979, p.187.
2
See for example Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.367, David Hill, Stanley Warburton, Mary Tussey and others, Turner in Yorkshire, exhibition catalogue, York City Art Gallery 1980, pp.49–51, David Hill and Michael Densley, Turner’s Birds: Bird Studies from Farnley Hall, [exhibition catalogue] Leeds City Art Gallery 1988, and Anne Lyles, Turner and Natural History: The Farnley Project, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1988.

Matthew Imms
September 2016

View as:
List
Grid

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Colour Studies for Subjects Commissioned by Walter Fawkes c.1818–22’, subset, 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/colour-studies-for-subjects-commissioned-by-walter-fawkes-r1183669, accessed 23 November 2024.