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

This is one of a large group of separate studies, most of which were made in gouache and watercolour on blue paper, associated with a visit to Petworth House in West Sussex, the home of the third Earl of Egremont. For more information, see the Introduction to this section.

Turner made this detailed copy of a painting in Lord Egremont’s collection on one of the sheets of blue paper he used to make colour studies of the house and its surroundings during his stay. His model was Anthony van Dyck’s c.1635–7 Lady Lucy Percy, Countess of Carlisle (Petworth Collection). This painting hung in the house’s White and Gold Room, along with four other Van Dyck portraits: for more information and a view of the interior, see the entry for Tate D22676 (Turner Bequest CCXLIV 14). Turner’s sketch replicates Van Dyck’s composition in its entirety, even indicating the finer details of the countess’s jewellery. He also took care to capture something of the Flemish master’s colour palette; however, the study equally relates to the palette seen in Turner’s other Petworth studies, likely due in part to the effects of gouache against a blue ground. Turner has made full use of the opaque quality of gouache here, perhaps to better suggest the quality of oil paint: the sitter’s face and flesh in particular are thickly denoted. The image sits within an apparently loosely planned rectangle, reflecting the format of Van Dyck’s canvas: the small coloured marks outside of the image in the upper right look like colour tests.

Ian Warrell and others have noted that this study after Van Dyck’s portrait provided the basis for a figure in Turner’s 1831 oil painting Lucy, Countess of Carlisle, and Dorothy Percy’s Visit to their Father Lord Percy, when under Attainder (Tate N00515). Petworth’s Van Dyck portraits also inspired the figures of Lord Percy, Lucy Percy and Ann Carr, Countess of Bedford, in the painting, while another Turner oil, A Lady in Van Dyck Costume (Tate N05511) further demonstrates Turner’s interest in the Petworth Van Dyck pictures, as well as their subjects - the Percy family resided at Petworth for much of its history, from 1150 until the late seventeenth-century.

Technical notes:

As noted above, the image sits within a roughly denoted rectangle, not filling the entire sheet of blue wove paper; there are some colour tests in both watercolour and gouache to the upper right.

Verso:

Blank, save for inscriptions: inscribed in pencil ‘37 a’ centre; stamped in black ‘CCXLIV 100’ bottom left; stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram bottom left.