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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Perspective lectures c.1809-28 > Perspective Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Inscription by Turner: Notes on Sunlight; with a Diagram of an Entablature c.1809

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Inscription by Turner: Notes on Sunlight; with a Diagram of an Entablature’ c.1809
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 88 Verso:
Inscription by Turner: Notes on Sunlight; with a Diagram of an Entablature circa 1809
D07505
Turner Bequest CVIII 88a
Pen and ink on white wove paper, 115 x 88 mm
Part watermark ‘J What | 180’
Inscribed by Turner in ink (see main catalogue entry) above and below the diagram
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The whole page is taken up with the following notes, including a diagram occupying most of the bottom half:
and when it below the Horizon even the | centre ray which we may pressume to | think a perpedicular appear to diverge | not from the centre but the extreme of | the disk and as the same light sould [sic] | therefore come between the hight of the | entablature and the Horizon yet so much | of the orb remains above the line of | the underneath part of the cornice that | preponderates.
Here there is a tentative diagram of the profile of a classical entablature, with a dotted diagonal line to its right. The notes continue:
that it is or appears in Shade and as the | power of casting shadows ceases when he | approaches the Horizon, even half the orb
This passage follows on from the opposite page, folio 89 recto (D07506), and continues on folio 87 verso (D07503). It is part of a sequence beginning on folio 91 verso (D07511), and running back to folio 82 verso (D07493). John Gage has discussed these provisional notes (not developed in the perspective lectures) as an example of Turner’s close observation of natural phenomena,1 in this case the question of sunlight travelling in parallel lines or otherwise, responding to a chapter of The Art of Painting by Gérard de Lairesse (1640–1711), in the English translation by John Frederick Frisch (London 1738 and later editions).2 See under D07511 for a discussion of Lairesse’s text. Maurice Davies has registered Turner’s notes as ‘on light and shadow’, as part of a longer sequence running back to folio 72 verso (D07473).3

Matthew Imms
June 2008

1
Gage 1969, p.252 note 217.
2
Ibid., p.178, as ‘TB CVIII, pp. 99a–82a’ (first folio actually 91a); see also Davies 1992, pp.51, 108 note 85.
3
Davies 1994, p.289.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Inscription by Turner: Notes on Sunlight; with a Diagram of an Entablature c.1809 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2008, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-inscription-by-turner-notes-on-sunlight-with-a-diagram-of-an-r1136701, accessed 19 September 2024.