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

Turner’s note reads:

Five leaves seem to have been removed from the sketchbook at this point and the first sentence might be part of a longer note now missing. It refers to gifts to Elizabeth I from the courtier and writer, Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) and to a work depicting one of these by Petruccio Ubaldini (fl.1545–99), a calligrapher and writer who spent much of his life in England working for the court as a scribe and illuminator and on occasional diplomatic missions. Matthew Imms has traced the source of Turner’s note to the following passage in a recently reissued memoir of Sidney: ‘On the first day of January 1577–8 Mr. Philip Sidney gave her Majesty, at her honour of Hampton Court, “a smock of camerick ...”. In 1580 his gift was “a cup of crystal covered with a cover.” In a roll, illuminated by Petrucci Ubaldini, he is depicted as presenting the Queen at a new year’s tide in 1581, with a “jewel of gold...”’1

The longer passage is an anecdote about the painter Francesco Solimena (1657–1747) and the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1659) involving the latter’s altarpiece incorporating the chair of St Peter (1666) in St Peter’s, Rome. It is an interesting example of the tales of artists’ lives and temperaments collected by Turner’s Romantic generation, usually to justify their independence and sense of self-worth. Thanks are due to Professor Nigel Llewellyn and Dr Jennifer Montagu for attempting to trace the source of this story, which so far remains obscure.