J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

This sketch, inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, shows the front of a sizeable mansion with a portico. This is probably 45 Grosvenor Place, the London home of Turner’s friend and patron Walter Fawkes: David Blayney Brown has noted that ‘Turner was a regular guest at Grosvenor Place’,1 a street in Belgravia running from Hyde Park Corner down the west side of the gardens of Buckingham House (now Palace), but the house itself does not survive.  A number of pencil sketches inside and from the house feature on subsequent pages.

The recto, with part of a sketch made at Eton in company with the Fawkes family, is D12520.

Technical notes:

There is some staining in the lower left-hand corner of the leaf, possibly caused by water damage sustained during the 1928 Tate flood.