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

For Turner’s visit to Sir John Leicester at Tabley in 1808, see Introduction to the sketchbook. The drawing shows three pictures, one on either side of a door and one over it. The pictures are annotated with their titles within their frames and the artists below them, as follows: on the left is a ‘Landscape’ by ‘Sir J. Leicester, Bart.:’; over the door is ‘The Money Changers in the Temple’ and ascribed to ‘M.A Carvagio’; and on the right is ‘Beeston Castle’ by ‘G. Barrett’.

Sir John Leicester was an amateur artist, some of whose pictures, ‘rapidly hurried over’, hung at Tabley.1 None of them is known today. William Jerdan tells of Turner while staying at Tabley making some small adjustment to a ‘landscape’ on which his host ‘was at work as the fancy mood struck him’;

Allegedly, once back in London Turner’s mercenary side got the better of him and he upset his host by sending a bill for ‘Instructions in painting’.2 Quite apart from the possibility that Turner had given such instruction and thought a fee was legitimate, Jerdan’s story may not be reliable anyway. He refers to Sir John as ‘His Lordship’ whereas the title of Lord de Tabley was only created in 1826, a year before his death, and there is no other evidence of a visit from Turner during that late period. In Turner’s drawing, a large painting by Sir John flanks Beeston Castle by George Barret (1738[or 32]–84), which Sir John presented via William Carey to the Royal Irish Institution, Dublin, in 1823;3 this was an inherited work, which had been painted for Sir Peter Byrne Leicester, Sir John’s father. Beeston Castle, near Tarporley, Cheshire, is a spectacularly sited ruin now in the care of English Heritage; Turner made a watercolour of the castle, circa 1809 (Ulster Museum, Belfast),4 having presumably seen it during his visit to Tabley in 1808.

The third picture, ascribed to Caravaggio [Michele Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610)], is currently unidentified but was presumably a copy or version; the family pictures at Tabley were mainly portraits and Sir John made a point of not collecting Old Masters and concentrating on modern British artists instead. The related floor plan and elevation with an outline of the same pictures on folio 34 verso (D40629) indicates the Picture Gallery at Tabley, recently created by Thomas Harrison of Chester from smaller rooms. The position of the door suggests the east wall of the central bay of the gallery. However, the room was altered again in the 1840s, and while the door frame is still similar the door itself is different and possibly wider than the one depicted.

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