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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Women Seated with Parasols and a Child, Probably Watching Cowes Regatta 1827

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 17 Verso:
Women Seated with Parasols and a Child, Probably Watching Cowes Regatta 1827
D20621
Turner Bequest CCXXVI 16a
Pencil on white wove paper, 192 x 112 mm
Partial watermark ‘R Bar | 18’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The drawing was made with the page turned vertically. It comprises two women with parasols, seen from behind seated on a slope, with what may be a small girl between them. The group and its setting evoke the parties of spectators on the shore below Cowes Castle in the finished painting East Cowes Castle, the Seat of J. Nash, Esq.; the Regatta Starting for their Moorings, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1828 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London),1 and the 1827 oil Sketch for ‘East Cowes Castle, the Regatta Starting for Their Moorings’ No.3 (Tate N01997).2
Compare in particular the slighter sketch of a bigger group on folio 13 recto (D20615; Turner Bequest CCXXVI 12), where other studies are noted. For more on studies in this sketchbook relating to the regatta events at Cowes from late July 1827 onwards, see the Introduction.

Matthew Imms
November 2015

1
Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984, pp.150–1 no.243, pl.247 (colour).
2
Ibid., p.161 no.265, pl.270 (colour).

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Women Seated with Parasols and a Child, Probably Watching Cowes Regatta 1827 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 2015, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2016, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-women-seated-with-parasols-and-a-child-probably-watching-r1183262, accessed 29 March 2024.