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

Inverted relative to the foliation, the following accounts occupy the bottom right-hand quarter of the page:

The ‘10’ at the end of the ‘Dort’ line is recorded by Finberg but the sketchbook has since been rebound too tightly to confirm this where the inscription runs into the gutter. It appears to be preceded by ‘27’ which, as there are only twenty shillings to a pound, appears to be an error on Turner’s part, as does the ‘20’ below.

Turner’s important Yorkshire patron and friend Walter Fawkes was spending far beyond his means at this time and around 1818 Turner lent him money and allowed significant invoices for pictures to go unsettled, albeit at an annual interest rate of £150, amounting to a debt of some £3000 by 1824.1 The first two lines here relate to that arrangement, as does the entry ‘Dort’, referring to the large painting Dort, or Dordrecht, the Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1818 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven),2 and nominally bought by Fawkes for 500 guineas according to contemporary sources.3 Hamilton interprets the figures here4 as £1200 ‘on some unknown security’, and £780 in cash, together with a valuation of the painting, and in addition £400 lent in cash to another important patron, Sir John Leicester,5 with further amounts due in interest.

Dort, or Dordrecht is also mentioned in a list of pictures and prices on folio 59 recto (D12204; Turner Bequest CLIV a 58), and as a possible Liber Studiorum subject on folio 29 recto (D12165; Turner Bequest CLIV a 28).6 The drawing across the upper half of the present page shows the main aspects of the composition, although not ‘the reed bed on the right’;7 whether this indicates that the sketch, which differs in several other respects, was made before the painting was finished or from memory is a moot point. The significance of the small drawing towards the bottom left, apparently a plan of two rooms with a door between them, is unknown. Another slight sketch possibly relating to the Dort is on folio 68 verso (D12220; Turner Bequest CLIV a 67a).

Technical notes:

There seems to be no sign of John Ruskin’s usual red ink foliation; there are such numbers on most of the earlier pages (see the Introduction to the sketchbook).