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

This view, north across the lake on the Farnley Hall estate (left blank in foreground), appears to be the basis of the watercolour Lindley Hall from Lake Tiny of about 1818 (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery),1 rather than the one in the larger Devonshire Rivers, No.3, and Wharfedale sketchbook (Tate D09792; Turner Bequest CXXXIV 3) which has previously been cited as the source despite the fact that the latter ‘differs in a number of details ... for example, the lake does not occupy the whole of the foreground.’2 The view beyond the right-hand edge of the present drawing is continued a little on the opposite page ‘above’ (folio 85 recto opposite and ‘above’ (D09785; Turner Bequest CXXXIII 82), but in the finished design the topography fades out at this point behind a rainstorm and rainbow.

There are distant views of the long, low, stone-built Lindley Hall (now Lindley Hall Farm and somewhat altered) looking north from the nearby Washburn Valley in a pencil sketch on a separate sheet of perhaps 1808 (Tate D12121; Turner Bequest CLIV W) and another from the early 1820s (Tate D12122; Turner Bequest CLIV Xa), the source of a finished watercolour of Lindley Bridge and Hall (private collection)3 painted about 1824; the latter, as David Hill notes in his catalogue entry, is similar to a drawing in the now-dispersed ‘Munro’ sketchbook of 1824 (the relevant leaf being currently untraced).4

A close-up view of the south side of the hall, probably drawn in 1816, is in the Devonshire Rivers, No.3, and Wharfedale sketchbook (Tate D09803; Turner Bequest CXXXIV 13), the source of a gouache of about 1818 or possibly ‘rather later’,5 perhaps even as late as 1824 by association with the distant gouache of the bridge and hall mentioned above.

See the Introduction to the sketchbook for other Farnley and nearby Yorkshire views in this book.