Joseph Mallord William Turner

Turner prepared Diagram 34 for Lecture 3 as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy. It illustrates a method for a perspective representation of a cube proposed by Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709), an Italian painter, architect and stage designer who published his designs in Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum (1693–1700). Turner derived his understanding of Pozzo’s method from John Joshua Kirby’s Dr Brook Taylor’s Method of Perspective made Easy, both in Theory and in Practice (1765, II, p.63; pl.XIX, fig.7), of which he owned a copy that had come to him from his friend Henry Scott Trimmer, a descendant of the author. In his early research of the method, Turner wrote Pozzo’s name and drew a diagram based on Kirby (1768, II, pl.XIX, fig.6) in his Windmill and Lock sketchbook (Tate D07976, D07980; Turner Bequest CXIV 12, 14). As Maurice Davies observes, the diagram in the sketchbook omitted the ground plan and consequently Turner made an error in the preliminary draft for his lecture1 which he corrected in the final version.2 Later, Turner added new material on Pozzo and produced a fresh diagram (Tate D16984; Turner Bequest CXCV 15).3

Technical notes:

Peter Bower states that the sheet is Double Elephant size Whatman paper made by William Balston, at Springfield Mill, Maidstone, Kent. The largest group within the perspective drawings, this batch of paper shows a ‘grid-like series of shadows that can be seen within the sheet in transmitted light. This appears to have been caused by a trial method of supporting the woven wire mould cover on the mould’. Because this is the only batch he has seen with such a feature, Bower believes that ‘it may have been tried on one pair of moulds and for some reason never tried again’. He also writes that it is ‘not the best Whatman paper by any means; the weight of this group is also very variable and the moulds have not been kept clean during use’.1

Verso:

Blank, save for an inscription by an unknown hand in pencil ‘80’ bottom left.