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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1787-1801 Student and master > Wales and the Marches 1792-4 > Drawings and Watercolours Connected with ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Skyrrid Farm and Ysgyryd Fawr 1792

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Skyrrid Farm and Ysgyryd Fawr’ 1792
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Skyrrid Farm and Ysgyryd Fawr 1792
D00145
Turner Bequest XII P
Pencil and watercolour within grey washline border, 245 x 337 mm on white wove paper, 285 x 375 mm
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The composition is based on Tate D00143 (Turner Bequest XII N); see also Tate D40039 (Turner Bequest XVII F [verso]) and D00144 (Turner Bequest XII O). Turner’s washline border confirms that this was a finished drawing intended for a patron, perhaps the Mr Brydges he noted on the verso of D00143. The essential features of the first watercolour version of the subject, D00144, are retained here, but the composition is extended to the right, and a second figure introduced: a youth looking over a fence who belongs generically with the various onlookers of the Don Quixote subject (Tate D00189; Turner Bequest XVII N). Finberg quotes Ruskin’s comment that the drawing is ‘very notable already for a kind of irised gradation of tender colour quite unprecedented in English art at the time.’1
1
See Cook and Wedderburn 1904, p.256.
Verso:
Blank; stamped in brown ink with Turner Bequest monogram; inscribed in a later hand ‘7’.

Andrew Wilton
April 2012

How to cite

Andrew Wilton, ‘Skyrrid Farm and Ysgyryd Fawr 1792 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 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-skyrrid-farm-and-ysgyryd-fawr-r1141137, accessed 18 April 2024.