Joseph Mallord William Turner

This is among dozens of blue paper studies made in and around East Cowes Castle, presumably during the same visit. For more on the various aspects of the house (demolished in about 1950), and its lost grounds as depicted by Turner, see the Introduction to this subsection. The present colour study was traditionally associated with Turner’s 1827 stay at Petworth in Sussex, after his Isle of Wight visit, where he produced a series similar in technique,1 addressed elsewhere in this catalogue.

There are a few drawings now identified as East Cowes interiors (see also Tate D20851, D20852, D22690, D22694, D22761; Turner Bequest CCXXVII a 48, 49, CCXLIV 28, 32, 99). This and D22690 apparently show the library with a woman in black seated with a harp, playing to a group of seated men and women; ink drawings of the room are D20851 and D20852.

Verso:

Blank; inscribed by John Ruskin in ink ‘239 | O’ bottom right; inscribed in pencil ‘16c’ right of centre; stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram above ‘CCXLIV – 43’ bottom left.

Ruskin’s number signifies that the sheet was in one of the parcels of unmounted sketches within the Turner Bequest CCXLIV grouping. Those marked with this particular number were described by him as ‘Colour on grey. Petworth. Worse’; as Finberg notes, this is in relation to those marked ‘238 | O’, described as ‘Inferior’.1