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

There seems to be a dark interior or curtained bed here, with a pale figure or figures reclining towards the right, but the composition is hardly developed beyond the original washes, which effectively form a reversed image on folio 32 recto opposite (D28831), one page showing the offset of the other. Raphael Rosenberg has given this as an example of Klecksography, or drawings generated by random smudging, starting from a sort of proto-Rorschach mirror image, in this case reading both pages as images of figures reclining on their elbows1 (see the overall Introduction to the present grouping).

For a wider discussion of the improvisatory and often erotic nature of the watercolour studies making up most of this sketchbook, see elsewhere in the Introduction.

The unaccessioned recto is inscribed in red ink ‘31’ and stamped ‘CCXCI(b) – 31’, and is blank save for slight offsetting of adventitious watercolour to or from folio 30 verso (itself unaccessioned, its recto being D28828).