Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Pencil on off-white wove paper, 170 x 104 mm
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ‘Carl’ (corrected from ‘Karl’) top left
Inscribed in pencil in another hand ‘Grahl | auf d Bad | in | Schandau’ top to centre
Signed by H.S. Trimmer and Charles Turner in black ink and inscribed ‘No 316 Contains 64 | Pencil Sketches on both | sides –’ centre towards rear
Signed in pencil by Charles Locke Eastlake ‘C.L.E.’ and John Prescott Knight ‘JPK’ towards bottom left
Inscribed in blue ink possibly by Ruskin ‘[...] 3 in [?paging]’ bottom right
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram bottom centre
Stamped in black ‘CCCVI’ top centre
Inscribed in pencil ‘CCCVI’ top centre
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The inscription in German ‘Grahl | auf d Bad | in | Schandau’ is not written in Turner’s hand. It presumably refers to Bad Schandau, a spa town located on the Elbe in south Saxony.
Inscriptions by the executors of Turner’s will (H.S. Trimmer, Charles Turner, Charles Locke Eastlake and John Prescott Knight) are below the German inscription (these are transcribed in full above). There is also an inscription in blue ink at bottom right ‘[...] 3 in [?paging]’ which may be by John Ruskin.
Alice Rylance-Watson
August 2015
How to cite
Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Sentences in German 1835 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 2015, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, August 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-sentences-in-german-r1186760, accessed 03 July 2026.
