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

J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Thames sketchbooks c.1804-14 > Studies for Pictures: Isleworth ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner A Pressed Leaf 1805

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Pressed Leaf’ 1805
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Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
A Pressed Leaf
D40571
Pressed leaf laid on tissue and set into paper mount tipped into sketchbook, 100 x 45 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Finberg transcribed and commented on John Ruskin’s endorsement of the sketchbook:
... One leaf cut out, where a real leaf of herb is laid. The study cut out was of vegetation at Warwick. The leaf probably to illustrate it.
(Note.–The leaf still remains in its place. The study cut out has been found and restored to its proper place. It is a study at Windsor, not Warwick.)1
Finberg noted folio 35 recto (D05543) as ‘the “study of vegetation”’ referred to,2 although the subject is now identified as Syon House. David Hill describes this actual leaf, subsequently mounted and tipped in before it, in the context of Turner’s ‘retreat into nature and his contact with the physical stuff of which it was made’.3

Matthew Imms
November 2012

1
Finberg 1909, I, p.233
2
Ibid., p.235.
3
Hill 1993, p.30; see also Bailey 1997, p.93..

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘A Pressed Leaf by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 2012, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, December 2012, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-a-pressed-leaf-r1140379, accessed 20 June 2013.