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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > East Sussex c.1806-20 > Hastings Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Address, Accounts &c (Inscriptions by Turner) c.1810

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Address, Accounts &c (Inscriptions by Turner)’ c.1810 (Inside front cover of sketchbook)
Inside front cover of sketchbook
Inside Front Cover:
Address, Accounts &c (Inscriptions by Turner) circa 1810
D07594
Turner Bequest CXI
Ink and pencil on white wove paper, 110 x 88 mm
Inscribed by Turner in ink and pencil (see main catalogue entry)
Endorsed by the Executors of the Turner Bequest ‘No 394 | 47 leaves of sketches – pencil’ and signed by Henry Scott Trimmer in ink ‘H S Trimmer’ and by John Prescott Knight and Charles Lock Eastlake in pencil ‘JPL’ and ‘C.L.E.’
Stamped in black ‘CXI’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner’s inscriptions consist of an address, ‘1 John Mews, Little James St. Bedford Road [or Row]’, written in ink, and some accounts in pencil:
Money received of Phillips            210 
Pd Platt                               17      10 
Mrs W                                   6       6 
Mrs D                                   4       4 
                                       28
The first item is Sir George Phillips’s payment for his commissioned picture Linlithgow Palace, Scotland (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool),1 which was shown at Turner’s Gallery in 1810. Butlin and Joll give its likely price as 200 guineas, which equates to £210. See folio 59 of the sketchbook for a further mention (D07686).
Anthony Bailey suggests that Platt might be a doctor and Mrs. W a midwife, hired to assist at the birth in 1811 of Georgiana, the second of Sarah Danby’s two daughters supposedly by Turner.2 Georgiana’s older sister, Evelina, was baptised at Guestling in 1801, and this East Sussex hamlet is mentioned on folio 99 (D07751). Georgiana later claimed to have been born in Surrey but this might have been a mistake for Sussex. The final item in this list may represent a balance of the monthly sum of £4 14 6 paid to Sarah Danby by the Royal Society of Musicians, as observed by Jean Golt who illustrates the relevant page of its Claimants’ Receipt Book for the year July 1810–June 1811;3 the accounts suggest that Turner sometimes claimed the allowance on Sarah’s behalf.

David Blayney Brown
May 2011

1
Butlin and Joll 1984, pp.74–5 no.104 (pl.111).
2
Jean Golt, ‘Danby, Sarah, née Goose (1760/66–1861)’, in Evelyn Joll, Martin Butlin and Luke Herrmann eds., The Oxford Companion to J.M.W. Turner, Oxford 2001, pp.71–2.
3
Golt 1989, p.7 fig.2.

How to cite

David Blayney Brown, ‘Address, Accounts &c (Inscriptions by Turner) c.1810’, catalogue entry, May 2011, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/address-accounts-c-inscriptions-by-turner-r1131082, accessed 26 April 2024.