Joseph Mallord William Turner

Engraved:
Etching and mezzotint by J.M.W. Turner and Charles Turner, untitled, published Charles Turner, 29 March 1809

Turner’s Liber Studiorum design, or rather the lettering of the prints derived from it, is the main evidence for the existence of a painting of the subject, dubbed ‘The Leader Sea Piece’, and dated to circa 1807–9 by Butlin and Joll.1 The Liber etching is lettered simply ‘Possession of W^m Leader Esq^r’, whereas the completed engraving’s caption seems vaguer: ‘Original Sketch of a Picture for W. Leader Esq^r.’ Although William Leader owned Turner’s painting Conway Castle, circa 1803 (private collection), ² apparently having acquired it directly from the artist, there is no other record of a further commission beyond the presence of Leader’s name in Turner’s checklists of Liber subjects (see below); it has been tentatively suggested that Turner could have been ‘evolving his painting at the same time as he evolved his “reproduction”’.3

Rawlinson had ‘heard on good authority that this fine subject is taken, almost without alteration, from a picture by W. Vandervelde’.4 The composition can be compared, for example,5 to a painting in the National Gallery, London (NG977), thought to be a studio work after Willem van de Velde the Younger (1633–1707). Turner had painted Dutch Boats in a Gale (‘The Bridgewater Seapiece’), exhibited 1801 (private collection, on long-term loan to the National Gallery, London)6 as a pendant to another of the Dutchman’s works.

There is a variant watercolour at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (12.279), dated by Gillian Forrester to the same period as the Turner Bequest study, with a warship – silhouetted rather than highlighted – in the left distance, and a sailing boat in the right foreground, seen side-on;7 the latter is comparable to those in the Dutch Boats in a Gale (see above) and the later Wreck of a Transport Ship, exhibited 1810 (Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon).8 The overall composition is close to another painting, Sheerness as Seen from the Nore, exhibited 1808 (private collection),9 an affinity acknowledged in the alternative title for the plate in the early Liber literature: ‘The Guard-Ship at the Nore’. As the early provenance of Sheerness has not been definitely established, Forrester notes that ‘it is tempting to suggest that the picture may have belonged to William Leader, and that the Liber plate is simply a variant of the finished painting.’10