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 1813 > Chemistry and Apuleia Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Inscription by Turner: A Recipe for Waterproofing Cloth c.1813

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Inscription by Turner: A Recipe for Waterproofing Cloth’ c.1813
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 1 Verso:
Inscription by Turner: A Recipe for Waterproofing Cloth c.1813
D09890
Turner Bequest CXXXV 1a
Pen and ink on white wove paper, 88 x 113 mm
Part watermark ‘C Wil | 18’
Inscribed by Turner in ink with notes (see main catalogue entry)
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The top half of the page is filled with the following inscription:
Receipt for cover Linen to make | it [?impermeable] to water | Take ¼ lb. of Gum Elastic | ¾ of a Pint of Boild Linseed oil } [bracketing this and the previous line] boild slowly | when dissolved, 2 Pints of [‘boild’ inserted above] oil added & Pd of Rosin | 1 do [i.e. ditto] of yellow wax and as much Litharge are | add and boild together. put on pots
This recipe was first paraphrased by Thornbury.1 Joyce Townsend has noted that this is ‘apparently a recipe for oilcloth’, without ascertaining its origin,2 and reads ‘Gum Elastic’ as ‘Gum Mastic’. However, in following the source quoted below, Turner intended the former (a synonym for india-rubber); rosin is the solid residue from the process of distilling turpentine; and litharge is a form of lead oxide.3
The notes appear to come from The Tradesman: or, Commercial Magazine, volume 11, number 10, of October 1813. In a regular section headed ‘Inventions and Discoveries in the Arts and Sciences on the Continent of Europe’, beginning on page 303 and including such items as ‘A Method of Boiling Silk, by which very little of its Weight is lost’ from Le Publiciste, and an ‘Account of a domestic Filter for purifying Water’ from the Transactions de la Société Médicale de Bordeaux, the following item features on page 304:
Plaster for rendering Linen Cloth impermeable to Air and Water.
A QUARTER of a pound of gum elastic is boiled slowly with three quarters of a pint of boiled linseed oil. When the gum is dissolved, about two pints of boiled oil, one pound of rosin, one pound of yellow wax, and as much litharge are added, the whole is boiled together. This mass is applied whilst hot to the linen, which remains after this layer, as supple as it was before, and it may be employed instead of leather for pipes to the fire engines, or covering for loaded waggons and other articles which require to be kept from moisture. Hempen cloth is the best to be used, and the seams should be done twice over.
(Magazin der Erfindungen.)
The citation apparently refers to Adam Baumgärtner’s Leipzig periodical, the Neues Magazin der Erfindungen (‘New Magazine of Invention’), published between 1811 and 1815 as a successor to Das Magazin aller neuen Erfindungen (1803–10).4 It is notable that French and German magazines were routinely cited and translated in the Tradesman at this stage of the Napoleonic Wars, and that Turner should have found useful information in a general commercial and technical magazine. This is one of several pages of recipes and notes on chemistry in the present sketchbook (see the Introduction).5
1
Thornbury 1862, I, p.359; see also close variation in Thornbury 1897, p.475.
2
Townsend 1992, p.6, with transcription (followed here with slight variations).
3
Informed by the Oxford English Dictionary, accessed 11 March 2009, http://www.oed.com.
4
See Karl Karmarsch, ‘Baumgartner, Adam Friedrich Gotthelf’ from ‘Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie’ (1875), Deutsche Biographie, accessed 19 April 2014, http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz2327.html.
5
The present entry is summarised in Imms 2011, p.4.
Technical notes:
There is staining showing through from the recto (D09889), from the leather overlapping inside the cover of the sketchbook (D41524).

Matthew Imms
April 2014

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Inscription by Turner: A Recipe for Waterproofing Cloth c.1813 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 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-inscription-by-turner-a-recipe-for-waterproofing-cloth-r1147845, accessed 20 April 2024.