'Study for 'Traitor's Gate, Tower of London', Rogers's 'Poems'', Joseph Mallord William Turner

Artwork details

Artist

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775‑1851)

Title

Study for 'Traitor's Gate, Tower of London', Rogers's 'Poems'

From Watercolours Related to Samuel Rogers's Poems

Date c.1830-2

MediumGraphite and watercolour on paper

Dimensionssupport: 193 x 241 mm

Collection

Tate

Acquisition Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

Reference

D27610

Turner Bequest CCLXXX 93

View this artwork by appointment, at Tate Britain's Prints and Drawings Rooms

Catalogue entry

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851

Study for ‘Traitor’s Gate, Tower of London’, Rogers’s ‘Poems’ circa 1830–2

D27610
Turner Bequest CCLXXX 93

Pencil and watercolour, approximately 130 x 145 mm on white wove paper, 190 x 240 mm
Inscribed in pencil with short ruled line at top of sheet
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘(93’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXX 93’ bottom right

Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

Exhibition history

References

This is a study for the finished vignette, Traitor’s Gate (see Tate 27694; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 177) which was published in the 1834 edition of Rogers’s Poems as an illustration to the poem, ‘Human Life’. The two compositions are closely related in form and content. In the final version, however, as Ian Warrell has observed, Turner heightened the central keep of the Tower to improve the balance of the design.1

The style and medium of the sketch are typical of Turner’s preparatory studies for Rogers’s Poems, which tend to be executed in pencil and light watercolour wash and are made on papers of similar type and dimensions.

Warrell 1994, p.166.

Verso:

Inscribed by an unknown hand in blue pencil ‘219’ centre left

Meredith Gamer
August 2006

Read this catalogue entry in full

This catalogue entry is part of: David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, December 2012.