Joseph Mallord William Turner

Ian Warrell has noted how Turner organised his sketchbooks from the 1819–20 Italian tour with paper spine labels and marking ‘the outer edges of the pages of his standard size books with numbers indicating the sequence in which they had been used, suggesting that he perhaps stowed this core group in a box for frequent reference’.1 In this case, the number ‘4’ marking the top edge of the page block is not repeated here, while the label on the spine (D40893) appears to be numbered ‘9’, although just possibly it could also be ‘4’.2