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

With the page turned vertically, at the top is a swift study of a stooping man, perhaps a sailor or docker whose ‘red sleeves’ caught Turner’s attention in the vicinity of Old London Bridge, the focus of many sketches in this book; see the Introduction.

The bridge studies appear to date from 1824, and the man was probably preceded on this page by the more elaborate drawing below, which also includes extensive colour notes.1 As Finberg recognised, it shows the painting known as Le Chapeau de Paille (the straw hat) of about 1622–5, by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640),2 now in the National Gallery, London. The hat is not straw; perhaps owing to an English misunderstanding, ‘paille’ may have been a mistake for ‘poil’, meaning felt. The sitter is probably Rubens’s sister-in-law, Susanna Lunden, née Fourment.3 Turner presumably copied it when it was shown in London from March to April or June 1823,4 at George Stanley’s Rooms in Bond Street; it was subsequently acquired by the future Prime Minister, (Sir) Robert Peel.5

Ten years later, Turner would copy Rubens’s candid portrait of his wife Hélène Fourment in a Fur Wrap (‘Het Pelsken’) in the Imperial Picture Gallery at Vienna (now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum), inside the front cover of the Vienna up to Venice sketchbook (Tate D41262; Turner Bequest CCCXI).6

On folio 1 recto (D17834) is Turner’s sketch of Benjamin Robert Haydon’s large painting of The Raising of Lazarus, also exhibited in London in the spring of 1823.