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

This is one of a series of sketches relating to Sandycombe Lodge, Turner’s self-designed Twickenham house (see the Introduction to the sketchbook), occupying most of the pages between folio 73 verso (D08057) and folio 86 verso (D08083), and apparently made working inwards from the back of the book.

Here, Turner shows a notional plan of the house (of the deep, narrow ‘Type A’ type categorised by Patrick Youngblood, as discussed in the Introduction to the Sandycombe section). As Youngblood notes,1 this plan relates to the topographical rendering of an unexecuted design in its setting on folios 73 verso and 74 recto (D08057, D08058). There is a largely illegible pencil calculation at the top left, in which some of the figures have been overwritten. As it now stands it appears that two ‘80’ and ‘80’ have been multiplied to produce ‘640’; there is also a small cluster of letters or symbols just to the right.