This may be a rare instance of Turner applying colour while actually sketching (or possibly later, guided by his tonal pencil hatching). The colours across a band in the middle distance are soft tones of grey, grey-green, yellow or ochre, red and blue, with the grey confined to flat washes within the silhouette of the castle, and the colours applied sparingly in disjointed dabs across the foliage. The point inscribed ‘R’ has been coloured red, and there may be one or two other inscriptions too delicate to be sure of, similar to the tiny words and letters which annotate the three-part panorama in pencil alone mentioned above.
John Gage has seen the sketch as an early use by Turner of ‘prismatic’ colour, with ‘small flecks of red, blue and yellow only’,
1 in his development of a sort of conceptual, proto-‘pointillism’,
2 although Andrew Wilton has noted that the red and yellow can be explained by Turner’s sketching at Raby in October, when the colours of the autumn leaves would have been at their most intense.
3 The foliage in the 1818 painting is fairly muted, and keyed to the silvery light of the sun breaking through cloud.
Matthew Imms
February 2010