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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner A Recumbent Female Figure c.1845

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Recumbent Female Figure’ c.1845
A Recumbent Female Figure c.1845
D35257
Turner Bequest CCCLIII 18
Chalk and gouache on white wove paper prepared with a grey wash, 222 x 332 mm
Watermark ‘J Whatman | Turkey Mills | 1823’
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram bottom right
Inscribed in red ink ‘18’ bottom right; and again ‘[?18]’ (much smudged)
Stamped in black ‘CCCLIII 18’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This drawing depicts a half-draped, recumbent female figure. Turner has created a great range of texture and colour by varying his use of chalk and gouache. Washes of deep peach gouache are effective in suggesting the smooth texture of skin on the legs; three-dimensionality is provided here by flicks of grey watercolour for shadow. The woman’s hand is rendered in a remarkably brilliant pink, perhaps a result of gouache over the top of red chalk. The model’s upper torso and head are given a more diluted wash of pink; her shape is sculpted by Turner’s red chalk outlines and white chalk highlights.
The drapery around the figure’s abdomen is treated differently again: though the condition of the sheet makes it difficult to determine, Turner appears to have used the white of the paper as the basis for the cloth, and has worked up its folds using both white chalk and grey gouache. Although the figure seems to hover in space, Turner has defined around her head and shoulders by shading around them in white chalk; otherwise the background is dark and shadowy.
The model here may be Turner’s landlady and companion, Sophia Booth, as suggested by Ian Warrell.1 Mrs Booth ran a lodging house that Turner stayed in when visiting Margate; she may also be the model in two other sketches from this book (D35256 and D35258; CCCLIII 17. 19). However, there is also potential that this drawing, and that showing the head of a woman(D35258), may substantiate the claim made by Bernard Falk, based on anecdotes from the engraver John Pye, that Turner was so arrested one night by the sight of a drowned girl being pulled out of the Thames that he made a sketch of her.2
1
Warrell 2012, p.136; see also Loukes 2015, p.29
2
Bernard Falk, Turner the Painter: His Hidden Life: A Frank and Revealing Biography, London 1938, p.220.
Technical Notes:
There is a fibre, possibly from a paintbrush, encrusted on the surface towards the left-hand side of the page, on the figure’s head. A horizontal tear at the right-hand edge measures 21 mm. That edge is discoloured, and spots of the pigment used to prepare the ground have formed across the page, both likely as a result of damage in the Tate Gallery flood of 1928. This leaf is mounted.
Verso:
Blank; some adventitious marks in black watercolour and spots where red ink inscriptions have bled through from overleaf.

Amy Concannon
May 2025

How to cite

Amy Concannon, ‘A Recumbent Female Figure c.1845’, catalogue entry, May 2025, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, July 2026, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/a-recumbent-female-figure-r1214165, accessed 11 July 2026.