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 > II. Various Perspective Diagrams > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Lecture Diagram: Colour Circle No.2 c.1824-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Lecture Diagram: Colour Circle No.2’ c.1824-8
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Lecture Diagram: Colour Circle No.2 circa 1824–8
D17150
Turner Bequest CXCV 179
Pencil and watercolour on white wove paper, 550 x 758 mm
Watermarked ‘...1824’
Inscribed by Turner in red watercolour ‘No 2’ bottom centre
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘179’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This is the second of the diagrams of colour circles (see also Tate D17149; Turner Bequest CXCV 178) created by Turner towards the end of his tenure as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy. See notes to D17149 for John Gage’s provisional dating of the diagrams and corresponding lecture text to 1827, when Turner would have heard Thomas Phillips’s Academy lectures on colour, and his further suggestion that Turner had collected the relevant information earlier, perhaps in 1825.1 Turner based the drawings on a colour wheel from Moses Harris’s manual, Natural System of Colours (1811, p.5) but, as both Gage and Martin Kemp describe, rethought and reconfigured Harris’s wheel to explore the differences between ‘aerial’ or light colours, as in the spectrum (in Colour Circle No.1, see Tate D17149), as in the spectrum, and ‘material’ colours, as in pigments (in Colour Circle No.2), as in pigments. This diagram shows how the three primary colours – yellow, blue and red – mix to make a muddy grey.
1
Turner, ‘Royal Academy Lectures’, circa 1807–38, Department of Western Manuscripts, British Library, London, ADD MS 46151 BB folios 66–7, 68–9 verso.
Verso:
Currently laid down

Andrea Fredericksen
January 2004

Supported by The Samuel H. Kress Foundation

Revised by David Blayney Brown
January 2012

How to cite

Andrea Fredericksen, ‘Lecture Diagram: Colour Circle No.2 c.1824–8 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, January 2004, revised by David Blayney Brown, January 2012, 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-lecture-diagram-colour-circle-no2-r1136800, accessed 25 April 2024.