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

D02237–D02240, D02242, D04184, D08262, D40259

Turner Bequest XLVIII 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, LXX g, CXXI G

Leaves from a sketchbook, disbound at an early date and now largely dispersed
7 leaves of white wove paper; approximate page size up to 271 x 416 mm; watermark ‘J Whatman 1794’

Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

The few leaves from this sketchbook remaining in the Turner Bequest comprise views of Oxford from about 1798–9, with one of Durham made on the way to Scotland in 1801. The source of the book’s traditional name is unclear: Finberg called it the ‘“Smaller Fonthill” Sketch Book’,1 with the quotation marks he conventionally uses to indicate a transcription, though no covers or labels survive, so this may be a quirk of typography. There are extensive drawings of William Beckford’s Wiltshire house, Fonthill Abbey, in the course of construction in 1799 in the Fonthill sketchbook (Tate; Turner Bequest XLVII), addressed elsewhere in the present section of this catalogue. Included in this subsection are two sheets not associated with the Smaller Fonthill sketchbook by Finberg (D04184, D08262; Turner Bequest LXX g, CXXI G), respectively views of Durham and Oxford.

Conversely, some of the Smaller Fonthill drawings that remain in the Bequest are not by Turner, including the views at Fonthill itself.2 Fonthill: The Abbey from the South East (Tate D02236; Turner Bequest XLVIII 1)3 is in pencil, measuring 275 x 412 mm. At first sight it appears to be autograph; it is in fact somewhat tentative, and given that the sketches on the verso are almost certainly not in Turner’s hand it seems likely that the same artist was responsible for this view. Compare views of Fonthill by Turner himself in the Fonthill sketchbook. The verso (D40258) comprises Three Studies: Men Lifting Stones with a Pulley; a Horse; and a Gothic Window and Crenellation, also in pencil.4 Although not as accomplished, or as plausibly Turnerian, as the view of the house on the recto, these studies showing details of life during the building of Fonthill may be by the same hand, as may the following drawing.

A House among Trees (Tate D02241; Turner Bequest XLVIII 6)5 is in pencil with grey and blue-grey washes, measuring 254 x 414 mm. The verso is inscribed by John Ruskin in pencil ‘Mount & Frame | Original of Vignette to Italy | JR’. This is the most substantial of the Smaller Fonthill drawings that are clearly by a hand other than Turner’s. It is very likely by the author of the view of Fonthill discussed above, but its washes are clumsily handled, and quite unlike any use of that medium by Turner himself. Ruskin’s reasoning is difficult to reconstruct: he was presumably thinking of the vignette design known as An Old Manor-House (Tate D27718; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 201),6 engraved for the 1834 edition of Samuel Rogers’s Poems (Tate impressions: T05115, T06163), but must have made his observation from memory, since there is in reality little resemblance between the two images, and the house in the vignette is much more substantial. Finberg did not question Ruskin’s assumption of Turner’s authorship, and added the information that Ruskin had written on the ‘margin of mount’ (no longer extant): ‘Original of the Vignette to “Human Life”, Rogers. J.R.’7 This second inscription rectifies the error of the first, which had ascribed the ‘old manor house’ design to Italy (1830) rather than the Poems, but seems nevertheless to have been a comment made without checking the vignette itself. The seventeenth-century house in the Smaller Fonthill drawing has not been identified, but may be somewhere close to Fonthill, where the other amateur drawings seem to have been made.

Regarding another drawing previously associated with Turner, of Workmen at Fonthill (private collection), while some aspects of the execution (notably the large tree at the left) show a knowledge of his manner, the palette and use of coarse buff paper suggest an acquaintance with the work of Thomas Girtin (1775–1802) as well.

A checklist of the considerable number of Turner’s drawings identified as originating in the Smaller Fonthill book, but since dispersed to other collections, is given here. Most were made in the course of the tour to Scotland in 1801: