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

Written with the sketchbook inverted. At left Turner writes (in a florid, cursive hand):

Here, and on folios 16 and verso and 77 verso–78 (D07772–D07773, D07835–D07836), Turner is collecting references and making notes for his lectures as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy. Christoph Clavius (1538–1612) translated the Elements of Euclid (circa 325BC–265BC) in 1574. Proclus Diadochus (411–85), head of Plato’s Academy, was a commentator on mathematics. The mathematician Brook Taylor (1685–1731) revolutionised the study of standard perspective in publications of 1715 and 1719 and was admired for much of the century. Among Turner’s preferred sources were Thomas Malton (Senior), A Compleat Treatise on Perspective in Theory and Practice on the True Principles of Dr Brook Taylor (1775) which he may have consulted in the library of the British Museum, and John Joshua Kirby, Dr Brook Taylor’s Method of Perspective Made Easy, both in Theory and Practice of which he owned a copy of the third edition (1765).1 However, Turner was sceptical of Taylor’s methodology, which based perspective on a theoretical foundation of Euclidian geometry; instead, Turner preferred to offer students practical rules which they could follow without recourse to proof.2

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