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

Turner filled several pages in this sketchbook with pen and ink studies of leaves: see also Tate D22649–D22650, D22653, D22659–D22662; Turner Bequest CCXLIII 72–73, 75, 79–82). While the leaves seen here, and those making up one of the sketches on D22650, are rather indistinct, the others have been identified as dock leaves.

Turner used his sketchbooks to record details of leaves and foliage at various points during his career, usually with a finished painting in mind. See, for example, the study of dock leaves in the Greenwich sketchbook (Tate D06770; Turner Bequest CII 26): in the present catalogue’s entry, David Blayney Brown connects that sketch to a dock plant in the foreground of Turner’s 1809 painting London from Greenwich Park (Tate N00483).1 It is unclear if there is such a connection between the sketches in the present sketchbook and any finished oil, of Petworth or elsewhere. The frames made by Jonathan Ritson (c.1780–1846) to house Turner’s canvases within Petworth’s Carved Room (for which scheme see the Introduction to this subsection), some of which were sufficiently progressed to be seen in situ by the summer of 1828, include a leaf design.2

Turner annotated this and some of the other studies of dock leaves in the sketchbook. The meaning of these notes remains mysterious. However, if the reading of the word ‘ink’ is correct in relation to the present sheet it seems probable they relate to materials and pigments rather than the specifics of the plants studied.

As it is unclear if these sketches were made at the same time as the drawings of Petworth also included in the sketchbook (see the Introduction to this subsection), the dating remains uncertain. The particular use of the pen and ink technique, however, does not contradict a date of around 1827, contemporary with the Petworth sketches.

Technical notes:

An area of dark ink has pooled on the right-hand edge.

Verso:

Blank; inscribed in red ink ‘73’ upper left.