Joseph Mallord William Turner

This page and folio 13 recto (D15264) have both been treated with broadly brushed washes of colour suggesting a generic scene of waves off a beach and cliffs below a dark sky; in each case the beach recedes towards pinkish cliffs on the right, painted within a reserved area above the horizon. They and the more serene, barely articulated shore scenes on folios 10 recto and 11 recto (D15261–D15262) are of the type Finberg called ‘colour beginnings’, among which are the best known are the separate sheets in Turner Bequest section CCLXIII;1 for a discussion of the function of such works in general, see the Introduction to the ‘England and Wales Colour Studies c.1825–39’ section.2

Finberg used the same undifferentiated description for all four of the pages here: ‘Commencement of a water colour drawing’.3 Martin Butlin has described the use of ‘basic colours representing the foreground, distance and sky, of a kind that may have been the starting-out point for some of the other sketches’, meaning the watercolours of Lake Como, Milan and Venice earlier in the sketchbook (see the Introduction), which share horizontal colour structures, developed and articulated by elements of landscape and architecture.4 Butlin has suggested that the ‘two stormy coast scenes’ (this and D15264) were ‘probably made on the Adriatic coast’,5 on Turner’s route, after Venice and Bologna, south-east between Rimini and Ancona (see the Introduction to the contemporary Venice to Ancona sketchbook; Tate; Turner Bequest CLXXVI).

Butlin and Evelyn Joll have pointed out similarities with an undeveloped Landscape Composition in oils (Tate N05523),6 and a page from the Rome: Colour Studies sketchbook, used on the present tour (Tate D16385; Turner Bequest CLXXXIX 55), with bands of colour applied on a page previously treated with a pale grey wash.7 In their handling and impression of provisional immediacy and strong lighting, this and D15264 are also comparable with some of the working compositions probably created a few years later and associated with English subjects for the ongoing Southern Coast project (such as Tate D25410, D25426, D25437; Turner Bequest CCLXIII 287, 303, 314). Even in the 1840s, Turner was still evoking his reactions to such effects, for instance in the Ideas of Folkestone sketchbook (Tate D35361, D25385; Turner Bequest CCCLVI 1, 24).