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

Inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, a seated naked woman is seen from the right, with her right arm outstretched. The economical, fragmentary figure is defined by colour alone, with the barely modulated pink enhanced by touches of white along the arm, hip and thigh. The limbs fade out without indications of feet, and the head is an undeveloped silhouette, suggesting that the face is turned away. In his study of Turner’s erotica, Ian Warrell has observed that this ‘could equally be a standard Life Class pose, or something more informal’.1

Earlier in his career, Turner had sometimes worked in sketchbooks with their pages prepared with grey or brown washes, over which he would work in darker and lighter tones of pencil and chalk in a consciously Old Master-like way (sometimes in actual copies of Old Master paintings); figure studies in this manner include Susanna Bathing, after a Rembrandt Follower in the 1802 Studies in the Louvre sketchbook (Tate D04355; Turner Bequest LXXII 61). Although he did not try colour elsewhere in the present book, which includes papers of various pastel shades as well as white, he presumably chose to work in pink against the strong green here as an experiment in chromatic contrast. A reproduction of the figure as a silhouette without its green background, set in isolation against white,2 has inadvertently demonstrated by omission how the colours of the page and gouache activate each other.

See also the potentially erotic interior scene on folio 79 verso (D22554).