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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > West Country and Yorkshire 1814-17 > Devon Rivers, No.2 Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner ?Scientific Instruments, a Waggon, and Architectural Details, Perhaps at Farnley Hall ?1814

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘?Scientific Instruments, a Waggon, and Architectural Details, Perhaps at Farnley Hall’ ?1814
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 86 Verso:
?Scientific Instruments, a Waggon, and Architectural Details, Perhaps at Farnley Hall ?1814
D09788
Turner Bequest CXXXIII 83a
Pencil on white wove paper, 110 x 178 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The orientations of the individual sketches here are largely unclear. With the gutter at the top, there seems to be the profile of a railway waggon inverted at the top left, and some sort of mechanism or device at the top right. The objects towards the bottom left might be fittings at Farnley Hall, Yorkshire, as sketched from folio 74 verso (D09770) onwards, and the profile along the outer edge of the page may be of an architectural detail there. See the Introduction to the sketchbook for other Farnley and nearby Yorkshire views in this book.
Without identifying any of the items, John Gage suggests that ‘the chemical imagery’ of this and a handful of similar diagrams scattered through in Turner’s sketchbooks ‘takes us into the mythological world of traditional science’.1

Matthew Imms
July 2014

1
Gage 1969, p.136.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘?Scientific Instruments, a Waggon, and Architectural Details, Perhaps at Farnley Hall ?1814 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, September 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-scientific-instruments-a-waggon-and-architectural-details-r1147341, accessed 20 September 2024.