Joseph Mallord William Turner

The present drawing has traditionally been categorised as an unengraved design for the Liber Studiorum, and is based on Turner’s oil painting Windsor Castle from the Thames, circa 1805, which entered Lord Egremont’s collection at an undetermined but probably early date (Tate T03870, displayed at Petworth House, West Sussex).1 Other Liber studies (Tate D08114, D08168; Turner Bequest CXVI M, Vaughan Bequest CXVIII N) relate to Turner’s paintings in Egremont’s collection; as do the unpublished prints Narcissus and Echo,2 for which no drawing is known, and (at one remove, from Turner’s painting based on Egremont’s Claude) Apullia in Search of Appullus.3

Turner had made many studies of Windsor during his time living down the Thames at Isleworth in 1805,4 and appended the place-name to his signature on the painting. There are ‘one or two minor architectural peculiarities’ as compared with the latter, with a flagpole now visible on the turret and the Round Tower above the trees to the right.5 Turner may have been working from memory, but probably had recourse to the watercolour study in his Studies for Pictures: Isleworth sketchbook (Tate D05532; Turner Bequest XC 29 a) which he followed in most points in the oil. As compared to them both, the composition here been compressed by about a third, with the sheep, figures and quay all translated to the left in the ‘foresquare planar structure’,6 the boats beyond them omitted, and with individual elements looming larger; there are similar adaptations in other Liber drawings at one remove from existing compositions, for instance the composition known as Ships in a Breeze (for drawing see Tate D08114; Turner Bequest CXVI M). The painting has been described in Liber terminology as ‘one of the most “epic” of Turner’s pastorals’, with the shepherdess ‘more like a ballerina’.7

The composition is possibly recorded, as ‘ditto [Egremonts] Thames’, at the end of a list of published and unpublished ‘EP’ subjects in the Liber Notes (2) sketchbook (Tate D12163; Turner Bequest CLIV (a) 27);8 these notes (D12160–D12171; CLIV (a) 25a–31) were apparently made between 1808 and as late as 1818.9 Gillian Forrester also gives an alternative – as suggested by Finberg10 – The Thames at Eton, exhibited at Turner’s gallery in 1808 and also in Lord Egremont’s collection (Tate T03873, displayed at Petworth House, West Sussex),11 though no Liber-type drawing relating to the latter is known.12