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

Travel memoranda are inscribed in the space around a sketch of a female nude. The notes inscribed horizontally across the page appear to record a timetable or an account of travel expenses for the journey from Cologne to Coblenz to Mainz (rendered ‘May’, short for Mayence, the French for Mainz) to Mannheim. ‘Thrs’ may be a shortening of ‘thalers’, a type of coin used in the German Confederation at the time of Turner’s visit. The table is transcribed thus:

   Thrs Sq Fls K F
Cologne to Cob 4 10 -8 10 –3 15 6 8
Cob to May 9 10 16 20 7 – 12 16
––––– Manh 12 – 21 – 9 13 10
Scroeck 14 20 25 40 11 – 19 15
Cob to May 4 13 8 17 3 16 6 11

Further travel notes are inscribed with the sketchbook orientated to portrait. They may refer to schedules of steamer services on the Rhine running upstream from Cologne to Baden-Baden (with stops at Mainz, Worms, Germersheim, and Karlsruhe). They are transcribed:

Cologne to Cobl at 6 o Clock
Cob to Mayence 6
Mayence to Worms Spires – Germisheim &
from Germisheim to Schohin Carlsrhur
and Baden Baden M at 5 –
Back Schroeck
to Mayence 10
Mahinn to May
afternoon at 3

The figure sketch is one of two female nudes in Brussels up to Mannheim–Rhine sketchbook, the other having been drawn on the folio opposite (Tate D29770; Turner Bequest CCXCVI 91). While Cecilia Powell suggests these may have been women Turner encountered on his travels – a ‘useful reminder’, she writes, ‘that Turner had a private life’ – Ian Warrell points out that the women may also have been models.1 Given that the sketchbook is the only British one used on the 1833 tour, it is also possible that the drawings were produced before Turner went to the Continent, perhaps at a life drawing class.

Nudes appear elsewhere in sketchbooks contained within this tour grouping: in the Heidelberg up to Salzburg sketchbook a reclining figure is recorded (Tate D29968; Turner Bequest CCXCVIII 78) and in the Vienna up to Venice one reclining and one standing figure are depicted (Tate D31491, D31566; Turner Bequest CCCXI 38a, 76a). There are also associated loose drawings of female nudes rendered in pencil and in chalk on grey paper which Warell proposes were completed during the 1833 tour: see Tate D33939–D33940, D33942, D33944, D33969; Turner Bequest CCCXLI 228–230, 231, 232, 254.2

‘Inv 337’ is inscribed in red ink at the bottom right of the folio. Inscribed by John Ruskin during his inventory of the Turner Bequest at the National Gallery, the entire page, along with the page opposite (Tate D29770; Turner Bequest CCXCVI 91), was removed by Ruskin because of the erotic nature of the subject matter depicted.