Joseph Mallord William Turner

Lecture Diagram 36: A House in Perspective

c.1810

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

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Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of: I. Numbered Perspective Diagrams
Medium: Watercolour and tracing on paper
Dimensions: Support: 490 × 690 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference: D17052
Turner Bequest CXCV 82

Catalogue entry

This house drawn in perspective, whose guiding lines were traced from a preparatory drawing (Tate D17053; Turner Bequest CXCV 83), is the second of two diagrams numbered 36 made by Turner for Lecture 3 as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy. Maurice Davies suggests that Turner may have intended it to demonstrate how the perspective construction worked out in the previous Diagrams 35 and 36 (Tate D17049 and D17050; Turner Bequest CXCV 79, 80) can be used to produce an elegant watercolour.1

Davies 1992, p.44; Turner, ‘Royal Academy Lectures’, circa 1807–38, Department of Western Manuscripts, British Library, London, ADD MS 46151 M folios 8 verso, 9.

Technical notes:

Peter Bower states that the sheet is Super Royal size Whatman paper made by William Balston and Finch and Thomas Robert Hollingworth, at Turkey Mill, Maidstone, Kent. He notes that ‘all the sheets in this batch have some streaking across the sheet, probably from a fault in the sizing’.

Verso:

See Tate D40003.

Andrea Fredericksen
June 2004

Supported by The Samuel H. Kress Foundation

Revised by David Blayney Brown
January 2012

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