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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Northern France 1832 > Seine and Paris Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner A Fashionably Dressed Woman; An Elegant Company 1832

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Fashionably Dressed Woman; An Elegant Company’ 1832
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 24 Recto:
A Fashionably Dressed Woman; An Elegant Company 1832
D23927
Turner Bequest CCLIV 24
Pencil on white wove paper, 174 x 117 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘24’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCLIV – 24’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The elegant figures sketched onto this page have been linked to two closely contemporary, unfinished oil paintings known as Music Party, East Cowes Castle and Two Women with a Letter; see Tate N03550 and N05501.1 Certainly, the rear view of the woman with a long neck and high coiffure at the centre recurs in a very similar form in both of these works. The graceful counterpoise of the group in the top right-hand corner shares in the gallant atmosphere of the painted musical gathering. Art historian Ian Warrell has suggested that this page reflects the sociable dimension of Turner’s 1832 visit to Paris. One of the acquaintances in the city whom the artist is known to have contacted that year was William Somerville, so Warrell proposes that his Somerville’s wife, the mathematician and scientist Mary, is depicted here displaying her proficiency at the pianoforte.2

John Chu
July 2014

1
See Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984, p.282 under cats.447 and 448; Martin Butlin, Mollie Luther and Ian Warrell, Turner at Petworth: Painter and Patron, London 1989, pp.92 fig.89, 93; Anne Lyles, Turner: The Fifth Decade: Watercolours 1830–1840, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1992, p.62 under no.33.
2
Ian Warrell, Turner on the Seine, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1999, p.55.

How to cite

John Chu, ‘A Fashionably Dressed Woman; An Elegant Company 1832 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, April 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-a-fashionably-dressed-woman-an-elegant-company-r1173332, accessed 16 July 2025.