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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner Offset: Fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London date not known

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Offset: Fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London’ date not known
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Offset: Fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London
D40151
Watercolour offset on white wove paper, 235 x 325 mm
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This is the verso of D27853 (Turner Bequest CCLXXXIII 8), and bears watercolour traces offset from D27854 (Turner Bequest CCLXXXIII 9). It is one of a series of eight such offsets in a sequence showing that the nine closely related watercolour studies D27846–D27854 (Turner Bequest CCLXXXIII 1–9) were still bound together at the time of this transference to the adjacent versos in the sequence, though when this was remains a moot point (see the Technical notes in the Introduction to the sketchbook). The effect was not recorded in Finberg’s 1909 Inventory.1

Matthew Imms
April 2014

1
See A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.II, p.909

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Offset: Fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, September 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-offset-fire-at-the-grand-storehouse-of-the-tower-of-london-r1148254, accessed 14 July 2025.