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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Erotica and Improvisations c.1834-6 > Colour Studies (2) Sketchbook [Finberg ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner A Curtained Bed, with a Naked Woman Looking Out c.1834-6

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Curtained Bed, with a Naked Woman Looking Out’ c.1834-6
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 29 Verso:
A Curtained Bed, with a Naked Woman Looking Out c.1834–6
D28920
Turner Bequest CCXCI c 29
Watercolour on white wove paper, 79 x 101 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, within an elemental, billowing setting probably indicating a curtained bed (as so often in this book) the pale figure of a naked woman, apparently kneeling, peers out at the viewer from behind the hanging at the left.
For a discussion of the improvisatory and often erotic nature of the watercolour studies making up most of this sketchbook, see the Introduction.
Technical notes:
The unaccessioned, blank recto is numbered in red ink ‘29’ and stamped ‘CCXCI(c) – 29’; it bears some watercolour offsetting from folio 28 verso (D28918), particularly at the gutter. There is also some slight offsetting from the present page at the gutter of the unaccessioned recto of folio 30 opposite (its verso being D28922).

Matthew Imms
May 2014

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘A Curtained Bed, with a Naked Woman Looking Out c.1834–6 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 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-a-curtained-bed-with-a-naked-woman-looking-out-r1149004, accessed 27 April 2024.