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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Perspective lectures c.1809-28 > I. Numbered Perspective Diagrams > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Lecture Diagram 50: Doric Entablature in Perspective (after Thomas Malton Senior) c.1810

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Lecture Diagram 50: Doric Entablature in Perspective (after Thomas Malton Senior)’ c.1810
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Lecture Diagram 50: Doric Entablature in Perspective (after Thomas Malton Senior) circa 1810
D17067
Turner Bequest CXCV 97
Watercolour over transfer ink on white wove paper, 668 x 988 mm
Watermarked ‘J WHATMAN | 1808’
Inscribed by Turner in red watercolour ‘50’ top left
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘97’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Diagram 50 is based on an illustration from A Compleat Treatise on Perspective... (1775, pl.XVIII, fig.86) by the elder Thomas Malton (1726–1801), who used it to illustrate how to represent a Doric entablature ‘with an internal and external Angles’. Davies suggests that Diagrams 50 and 51 (Tate D17069; Turner Bequest CXCV 99) may have been used to illustrate the treatment of a cornice.1 The diagrams correspond to a draft text related by Maurice Davies to Lecture 4, prepared by Turner as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy.2 Turner traced Diagram 51 (Tate D17069; verso Tate D40018) to make the guiding lines of this diagram.
1
Davies 1994, p.118. See Turner, ‘Royal Academy Lectures’, circa 1807–38, Department of Western Manuscripts, British Library, London, ADD MS 46151 M folios 9 verso–10.
2
Davies 1994, p.272. See Turner, ‘Royal Academy Lectures’, circa 1807–38, Department of Western Manuscripts, British Library, London, ADD MS 46151 M folio 33.
Technical notes:
Peter Bower states that the sheet is Double Elephant Whatman paper made by William Balston, at Springfield Mill, Maidstone, Kent. The largest group within the perspective drawings, this batch of paper shows a ‘grid-like series of shadows that can be seen within the sheet in transmitted light. This appears to have been caused by a trial method of supporting the woven wire mould cover on the mould’. Because this is the only batch he has seen with such a feature, Bower believes that ‘it may have been tried on one pair of moulds and for some reason never tried again’. He also writes that it is ‘not the best Whatman paper by any means; the weight of this group is also very variable and the moulds have not been kept clean during use’.1
1
Notes in Tate catalogue files.
Verso:
Blank, save for an inscription by an unknown hand in pencil ‘97’ bottom left.

Andrea Fredericksen
June 2004

Supported by The Samuel H. Kress Foundation

Revised by David Blayney Brown
January 2012

How to cite

Andrea Fredericksen, ‘Lecture Diagram 50: Doric Entablature in Perspective (after Thomas Malton Senior) c.1810 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2004, revised by David Blayney Brown, January 2012, 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/joseph-mallord-william-turner-lecture-diagram-50-doric-entablature-in-perspective-after-r1136516, accessed 25 April 2024.