Joseph Mallord William Turner East Cowes Castle: The Drawing Room, with Figures 1827
Joseph Mallord William Turner,
East Cowes Castle: The Drawing Room, with Figures
1827
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
East Cowes Castle: The Drawing Room, with Figures 1827
D22694
Turner Bequest CCXLIV 32
Turner Bequest CCXLIV 32
Gouache and watercolour on blue wove paper, 137 x 195 mm
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram towards bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCXLIV 32’ bottom right
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram towards bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCXLIV 32’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Exhibition history
1951
The Turner Collection from Petworth, Tate Gallery, London, May–July 1951 (frame no.1, as ‘The Ladies’ Drawing Room’).
1964
Loan of Turner Watercolours from the British Museum, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, December 1964–January 1965, University of Nottingham Art Gallery January–March (no catalogue, as ‘The ladies’ drawing room’).
1970
Turner at Petworth: An Exhibition Arranged by the National Trust of Drawings of Petworth by J.M.W. Turner R.A. 1775–1851, Petworth House, Petworth, June–August 1970 (mount no.10).
1975
Turner in the British Museum: Drawings and Watercolours, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London, May 1975–February 1976 (120, reproduced. as ‘Petworth: Ladies in the drawing-room’, ?1828).
1979
Turner at Petworth, Petworth House, Petworth, August–October 1979 (no catalogue).
1983
Turner and the Human Figure: Watercolours from the Turner Bequest, Loaned by the British Museum, Tate Gallery, London, December 1983–July 1984 (no catalogue, as ‘The Ladies’ Drawing Room’).
2009
Turner / Rothko, Tate Britain, London, March–July 2009 (no catalogue, as ‘East Cowes Castle: The Drawing Room (‘The Ladies’ Drawing Room’)’).
2015
Turner’s Wessex: Architecture and Ambition, Salisbury Museum, May–September 2015 (no number, as ‘The Drawing Room at East Cowes Castle’, reproduced in colour).
References
1830
A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.II, p.744, CCXLIV 32, as ‘The ladies’ drawing room’, c.1830.
1983
Patrick Youngblood, ‘Three Mis-Identified Works by J.M.W. Turner’, Burlington Magazine, vol.125, October 1983, p.616, fig.57, as ‘The drawing room, East Cowes Castle’ (image transposed in error with that to which the ‘fig.58’ caption refers, Tate D22761; Turner Bequest CCXLIV 99).
1989
Ian Warrell in Martin Butlin, Mollie Luther and Warrell, Turner at Petworth: Painter and Patron, London 1989, p.148, pl.133 (colour), as ‘East Cowes Castle: the Drawing Room’.
1990
Martin Butlin, Mollie Luther and Ian Warrell, Turner at Petworth: Painter and Patron, London 1989, Turner: Les Années Egremont: Chefs d’oeuvre inédits, trans. Tamara Préaud, Paris 1990, pl.133 (colour).
2007
Ian Warrell, ‘J.M.W. Turner: “Interior of a Great House: the Drawing Room, East Cowes Castle”, c.1830’, in Robert Hoozee, John Gage, Timothy Hyman and others, British Vision: Observation and Imagination in British Art 1750–1950, exhibition catalogue, Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent 2007, p.328 note 17.
2015
Ian Warrell, Turner’s Wessex: Architecture and Ambition, exhibition catalogue, Salisbury Museum 2015, fig.168 (colour), as ‘The Drawing Room at East Cowes Castle’.
This is among dozens of blue paper studies made in and around East Cowes Castle, presumably during the same visit. For more on the various aspects of the house (demolished in about 1950), and its lost grounds as depicted by Turner, see the Introduction to this subsection. The present colour study was traditionally associated with Turner’s 1827 stay at Petworth in Sussex, after his Isle of Wight visit, where he produced a series similar in technique,1 addressed elsewhere in this catalogue.
There are a few drawings now identified as East Cowes interiors with figures, in this instance all apparently women (see also Tate D20851, D20852, D22690, D22705, D22761; CCXXVII a 48, 49, CCXLIV 28, 43, 99). Patrick Youngblood rejected the Petworth connection and identified this one as showing the drawing room at East Cowes Castle, looking south-west towards the smaller of the house’s two conservatories;2 the unusual apsidal form of the end of the room is shown, with its curved corners flanking the doorway, apparently flanked by its fireplace on the left and its deep bay window on the right.3
Youngblood was also the first to identify a painting of about 1835 now known as Music Party, East Cowes Castle (Tate N03550)4 as showing the adjacent ‘octagon room’, rather than a Petworth interior as traditionally thought; there are no identified drawings of that room, and the painting may have been prompted by a visit a few years later, as noted in the overall Introduction to this tour. The setting of a somewhat mysterious, unresolved painting of the 1830s, formerly linked to Petworth but presently called Interior of a Great House: The Drawing Room, East Cowes Castle (Tate N01988),5 has been compared by Ian Warrell to the unusual architectural forms recorded here and in a slighter pencil variation, D22761.6
Verso:
Blank (not available for inspection at time of writing).
Matthew Imms
November 2015
How to cite
Matthew Imms, ‘East Cowes Castle: The Drawing Room, with Figures 1827 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 2015, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2016, https://www