Joseph Mallord William Turner

Lecture Diagram 11: Spheres at Different Distances from the Eye (after Thomas Malton Senior)

c.1810

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

View by appointment
Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
I. Numbered Perspective Diagrams
Medium
Pen and ink and watercolour on paper
Dimensions
Support: 590 × 724 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D17145
Turner Bequest CXCV 174

Display caption

This diagram is based on an illustration from Thomas Malton’s A Compleat Treatise on Perspective 1775. It provides a model of vision as a cone of rays travelling from various globes towards the eye. Turner used it in Lecture 2 to discuss Malton’s first theorem that ‘Objects appear to have proportion to each other, respectively, as the angle under which they are seen’.

Gallery label, August 2004

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