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

For Turner’s stay in Brussels in 1817 and the city in this sketchbook, see notes to folio 9 verso (D12717).

Continued on folio 11 recto opposite (D12720), this quick outline begins a sequence of sketches taken from the northern outskirts of Brussels, running to folio 13 verso (D12725), where they are synthesised in a composition study. As Cecilia Powell has commented, Turner assembled this material in order to have a view of Brussels ‘at his fingertips as the need arose’.1 Some years later, he was able to use it as the basis of a watercolour of the city as seen from cornfields at harvest time (currently untraced),2 engraved by William Miller as the frontispiece for the fifth volume of The Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 1834 (Tate impression: T04729).

The volume contained Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk first published in 1816, and based on Scott’s letters to his own family during his European tour the previous year. Miller’s engraving shows how Turner used the sketches in this book to develop the design, and helps to clarify their content. This double–page spread, D12719–D12720, depicts the rising ground seen on the left in the print, while Turner’s inscription ‘corn’ on the present portion anticipates its foreground. Finberg misread this as ‘Arn’,3 causing some topographical confusion.

The view of Hougoumont, Waterloo, chosen as the title page vignette for Paul’s Letters in the Prose Works also originated from this sketchbook (see folio 26 recto; D12749).