Joseph Mallord William Turner

Diagram 50 is based on an illustration from A Compleat Treatise on Perspective... (1775, pl.XVIII, fig.86) by the elder Thomas Malton (1726–1801), who used it to illustrate how to represent a Doric entablature ‘with an internal and external Angles’. Davies suggests that Diagrams 50 and 51 (Tate D17069; Turner Bequest CXCV 99) may have been used to illustrate the treatment of a cornice.1 The diagrams correspond to a draft text related by Maurice Davies to Lecture 4, prepared by Turner as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy.2 Turner traced Diagram 51 (Tate D17069; verso Tate D40018) to make the guiding lines of this diagram.

Technical notes:

Peter Bower states that the sheet is Double Elephant 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 ‘97’ bottom left.