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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > West Country 1813 > Chemistry and Apuleia Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Inscription by Turner: A List of Bank-Note Numbers c.1813

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Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Inside Front Cover:
Inscription by Turner: A List of Bank-Note Numbers c.1813
D41524
Pen and ink on white wove paper, 88 x 113 mm
Inscribed by Turner in ink with table of accounts (see main catalogue entry)
Inscribed by Turner’s executors Henry Scott Trimmer, John Prescott Knight and Sir Charles Lock Eastlake in ink ‘No 371. | 14 <very> leaves of very slight sketches | HS Trimmer’ bottom centre, and in pencil ‘C.L.E.’ | ‘JPK’ bottom right
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram bottom centre
Stamped in black ‘CXXXV’ and inscribed in pencil ‘M.’ top left
Inscribed in pencil ‘CXXXV’ bottom left
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Most of the page is taken up with the following notes:
11284   twenty [?P.]        1813 July 3 1813
1256     June 5 1813 Cambridge [?Coll] 10
11466   June 17 1813                               10
1831     June 15 – 13                                10
17298  July 1        13                                10
10264  June 10    13                                 10
19214  May 20 – 13                                 10
Except for the top line, the table is crossed out in ink with a single large ‘X’. The table is likely to be a record of numbered and dated banknotes.1
The ‘Cambridge’ note had evidently been added after the main dates and figures, being in a smaller hand and paler ink. Its meaning is unclear, since although it might be assumed to relate to the university, Turner apparently had no significant contact with the place after the mid-1790s.2 There is a similar inscription on folio 67 recto (D09983).

Matthew Imms
April 2014

1
For a general discussion see Howard J.M. Hanley and Paul M. Holland, ‘Turner’s Banknotes and the West Country Tour of 1811’, Turner Society News, no.76, August 1997, pp.14–16.
2
See Andrew Kennedy, ‘Cambridge’ in Evelyn Joll, Martin Butlin and Luke Herrmann (eds.), The Oxford Companion to J.M.W. Turner, Oxford 2001, p.39.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Inscription by Turner: A List of Bank-Note Numbers c.1813 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, September 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-inscription-by-turner-a-list-of-bank-note-numbers-r1147843, accessed 26 April 2024.