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

Inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, the drawing is continued on folio 59 recto opposite (D02087). There is a separate study of a coat of arms at the top right of the present page. Gawthorpe Hall is in Padiham, just to the north west of Burnley, on the road to Whalley. Turner shows the west front of the house, which was built for the Shuttleworth family in the first decade of the seventeenth century. It was modified after Turner’s visit, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, by Sir Charles Barry.

Presumably, Turner subsequently made an untraced watercolour design of the house; however, unlike numerous other subjects,1 it was not used for Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s History of Whalley (1800–1) because Charles Townley of Towneley Hall, Burnley (see the contemporary Lancashire and North Wales sketchbook; Tate D01985; Turner Bequest XLV 45), found ‘an old and very bad painting’ of Gawthorpe, which he persuaded Whitaker to use instead.2 Turner wrote to Whitaker protesting about this treatment of his own work.3

The sketch of another house on folio 29 recto (D02039) of this book may also show a Lancashire property. For more drawings of private houses in the county see the Lancashire and North Wales book (Tate D01928–D01929, D01982; Turner Bequest XLV 14a–15, 42).