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

The page is inscribed by Turner, mainly in pencil but with a cross and the final line in ink, as follows:

This list of pictures, clients and prices, together with that on folio 66 verso and the further note on folio 68 of this sketchbook (D05242, D05244), provides the main evidence for its date. However, as noted in the Introduction, the identifiable works cover a span of years and there is no indication of when these notes were made and whether projects are past, current or future.

In order of listing, these are as follows. The ‘Bonvile’ and ‘Vorrepe’ for ‘Mr Green’ may be watercolours based on Turner’s Swiss tour in 1802 and unidentifiable today if indeed they were executed. A further possibility is that the first of these works is the same as the first of the two Bonneville subjects listed below and bracketed together, the pictures Bonneville, Savoy with Mont Blanc and Châteaux de St Michael, Bonneville, Savoy exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1803. A longstanding confusion between these pictures and their purchasers was convincingly resolved by Andrew Wilton1 who argued that the former was bought by John Green of Blackheath and is now at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut while the latter was bought by the banker Samuel Dobree in 1804 and is in the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Texas, rather than the other way around as described by Butlin and Joll in their catalogue.2 Mr Green’s ‘Mt. Blanc’ is also listed on folio 66 verso; the size, ‘3F by 4’, is the same as given here and conforms to that of the Yale picture.

The ‘Conway’ cannot be certainly identified but the client – Dr Thomas Lancaster, Perpetual Curate (1801–27) of Merton, Surrey and resident at 45 Gower Street, London – is noted, together with other clergymen, in Turner’s Hereford Court sketchbook (verso of Tate D01306; Turner Bequest XXXVIII 52) as prospective purchasers of versions of a view of Conway possibly including watercolours in the collections of Viscount Gage3 and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.4 At least five such watercolours are known, again with muddled early histories. They date from about 1800 or 1802, making the Conway probably the earliest project in Turner’s list. On the other hand, Lancaster’s version could have been an oil as it is bracketed here with a ‘Tummel’, perhaps to be identified with the small panel in the Yale Center for British Art5 if (as scholars have debated) that work is autograph. Lancaster owned a further small panel, Newark Abbey (Loyd collection).6

The ‘Edinburgh’ noted here is a further mystery. Its size and price suggests that it too was an oil, but no such picture is known today although an ‘Edinburgh from Carlton Hill’ was sold at Christie’s, 16 April 1853 (lot 95). Two drawings in Turner’s Calais Pier sketchbook (Tate D)5066, D05068; Turner Bequest LXXXI 164, 166) inscribed ‘Study for Edinburgh’ or a large watercolour of the subject (Tate D03639; Turner Bequest LX H) may have some bearing on this work. The client was John Allnutt, wine merchant, who owned a number of works by Turner. Of Mrs Lee and her picture nothing is known.