Joseph Mallord William Turner

This is one of a sequence of twenty-five recto pages of watercolour landscape, sea and sky compositions between folio 9 recto (D18609) and folio 34 recto (D18638), many of which evoke quiet Thames Valley scenes with water in the foreground; for a checklist and general comments, see the sketchbook’s Introduction.

While the bridge and silhouetted trees are treated in slight but relatively conventional fashion, the rapidly applied pigment in the foreground has been skimmed across the paper surface and has gathered in globules before drying; Eric Shanes has noted of the colour studies in this sequence: ‘In many of them Turner took advantage of the slight resistance of the paper to certain pigments’ to create ‘speckling effects’ which can add ‘enormous sparkle’.1 Compare the effect of the drawn outlines of the classical bridge on folio 20 recto (D18623).

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