Joseph Mallord William Turner, 'A Curtained Bed, with a Naked Couple Engaged in Sexual Activity' c.1834-6 (J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours) | Tate

Joseph Mallord William Turner A Curtained Bed, with a Naked Couple Engaged in Sexual Activity c.1834-6

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851

Folio 36 Recto:

A Curtained Bed, with a Naked Couple Engaged in Sexual Activity c.1834–6

D28837
Turner Bequest CCXCI b 36

Watercolour and pencil on white wove paper, 77 x 101 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘36’ bottom right (now faint)
Stamped in black ‘CCXCI(b) – 36’ bottom right

Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

Exhibition history

References

1909

A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.II, p.934, CCXCI b 36 (as ‘Do.’, i.e. ditto ‘Colour sketch’, as for folio 18 recto D28809).

1966

Lawrence Gowing, Turner: Imagination and Reality, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1966, reproduced, p.25, p.62 no.54 (as ‘Sketchbook with Figures’. c.1830).

1974

Martin Butlin, Andrew Wilton and John Gage, Turner 1775–1851, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy, London 1974, p.126 no.455, as ‘f.30^r [sic] A Couple on a Bed’.

1975

Gerald Wilkinson, Turner’s Colour Sketches 1820–34, London 1975, reproduced in colour, p.77.

1980

Pierre Rouve, Turner, étude de structures, Paris 1980, reproduced in colour, p.114 (reversed).

1982

Guy Weelan, J.M.W. Turner, trans. I. Mark Paris, New York 1982, pl.142.

1983

Andrew Wilton in John Gage, Jerrold Ziff, Nicholas Alfrey and others, J.M.W. Turner, à l’occasion du cinquantième anniversaire du British Council, exhibition catalogue, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris 1983, pp.[239]–40 no.173 (reproduced as c.1830–35).

1987

Andrew Wilton, Turner in his Time, London 1987, p.251, as part of ‘CCXCI (b) 29v–30’, pl.192 (as ‘A couple on a bed’. c.1830).

1997

James Hamilton, Turner: A Life, London 1997, reproduced opposite p.111, as ‘Lovers’, 1830s.

2001

Robert Upstone in Alison Smith (ed.), Exposed: The Victorian Nude, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2001, p.152 no.75 (as ‘A Copulating Couple’. c.1834).

2003

Ian Warrell, ‘Exploring the “Dark Side”: Ruskin and the Problem of Turner’s Erotica’, with ‘A Checklist of Erotic Sketches in the Turner Bequest’, British Art Journal, vol.4, no.1, Spring 2003, p.28, pl.58 (colour), untitled.

2007

Raphael Rosenberg, ‘Turner’ in Max Hollein and Rosenberg, Turner Hugo Moreau: Entdeckung der Abstraktion, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt 2007, pp.117, 127, 327 note 24, Abb.40 (colour), as ‘Farbskizze [Klecksografie mit erotischen Darstellung]’.

2007

Marina Wallace, Martin Kemp and Joanne Bernstein, Seduced: Art & Sex from Antiquity to Now, exhibition catalogue, Barbican Art Gallery, London 2007, reproduced in colour, p.163 (as ‘Colour Sketch Petworth’. c.1835–40).

2012

Ian Warrell, Turner’s Secret Sketches, London 2012, reproduced in colour, p.104, untitled.

Here, in one of the least ambiguous studies in this sketchbook (prompting likely erotic readings of the rather less developed pages),1 a naked man and woman embrace in the swirling darkness of the interior of a curtained bed. Some of the forms of the initial washes were offset to or from folio 35 verso opposite (D28835), and Raphael Rosenberg has given this as an example of Klecksography, or drawings generated by random smudging, in this case starting from a sort of proto-Rorschach mirror image, albeit in this case the compositions on the opposite pages were developed in different ways 2 (see the overall Introduction to the present grouping).

For a wider discussion of the improvisatory and often erotic nature of the watercolour studies making up most of this sketchbook, see elsewhere in the Introduction. Rosenberg has compared the treatment of the figures here with the head which appears in a study in the Fishing at the Weir sketchbook (Tate D27735; Turner Bequest CCLXXXI 6a) as evidence that they were done within a short space of time.3

When this sketchbook was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1966, the exhibited pages were not specified in the catalogue, and two double page spreads were reproduced: this and folio 35 verso opposite (D28835), and folios 41 verso–42 recto (D28844, D28846). When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1974, according to the catalogue it was open at ‘f.29^v Two Figures Watching a Sleeping Woman ... f.30^r A Couple in a Bed’4 but, despite the folio numbers, these titles in no way correspond to the slight subjects on folios 29 verso and 30 recto (D28827, D28828); rather, they apparently describe the more fully worked themes on this page and folio 35 verso opposite (D28835), and it is assumed here that these were the pages exhibited.

1

See Rosenberg 2007, p.117.

2

Ibid., pp.126–7.

3

Ibid., p.327 note 24.

4

Martin Butlin, Andrew Wilton and John Gage, Turner 1775–1851, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy, London 1974, p.126 no.455.

Verso:

Blank, save for slight offsetting of watercolour to or from folio 37 recto opposite (unaccessioned; the verso is D28838).

Matthew Imms
May 2014

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘A Curtained Bed, with a Naked Couple Engaged in Sexual Activity c.1834–6 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, September 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-a-curtained-bed-with-a-naked-couple-engaged-in-sexual-r1149063, accessed 06 May 2025.