Drawn with the sketchbook inverted, this is one of a group of drawings for
The Unpaid Bill, or the Dentist Reproving his Son’s Prodigality (collection of the Schindler Family)
1 painted for Richard Payne Knight and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1808. The others are on the verso and folios 78–81 verso (
D06487–D06491; Turner Bequest XCIX 73a–75a;
D07159; Turner Bequest CXCV (a) 1;
D06493,
D06494; Turner Bequest XCIX 77, 77a). Payne Knight, an influential collector, connoisseur and arbiter of taste, was forming a collection of pictures to show ‘that the moderns can stand up to the Old Masters’, as reported by the artist Richard Westall to his colleague Joseph Farington in February 1808,
2 and Robert Hunt, writing in the
Examiner of 15 May the same year, stated that Turner’s picture was conceived as a companion for his client’s ‘cradle-piece’ ascribed to Rembrandt –
The Holy Family at Night (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), then known as ‘The Cradle’. In 1808, Payne Knight lent the supposed Rembrandt to the British Institution where it was available to copy. In some notes for his lectures as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy perhaps written around this time, Turner was critical of its ‘artificial light and shade’, citing it as ‘a solitary instance [where] a great master may appear contrived’ and urging caution in adopting it as a model.
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