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

The building in the present view is not identified, but clearly belongs with the Virginia Water views discussed below, and was presumably a pavilion or summerhouse beside or near the lake. It features a fence or balustrade with diagonal slats, and appears to stand above a rockery-like feature.

Most of the drawings between here and folio 92 recto (D22149; Turner Bequest CCXXXVIII 90) were made around Virginia Water, the lake at the south end of Windsor Great Park, about five miles south of Windsor Castle (a frequent subject of Turner’s). The artificial lake, created between the 1740s and the 1790s,1 is about three miles long, with its western half towards Ascot and Sunningdale in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead (historically Berkshire), and its eastern half towards the village of Virginia Water in Surrey; between the lake and the village runs the London-Salisbury road, which Turner travelled on numerous occasions.

As the drawings are inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, it seems that Turner worked inwards from what is now regarded as the back of the sketchbook. Many of the views focus on the Chinese-style ‘Fishing Temple’ pavilion on the north shore of the lake, renovated in the Swiss style in 1867 and demolished in 1936.2 It would become the focus of two watercolours of Virginia Water, engraved for The Keepsake. The first (private collection),3 showing the Fishing Temple at an oblique angle from the south-east, was engraved in 1830 (Tate impressions: T04618, T06141); so was the second (untraced),4 a head-on view from the south with Johnson’s Pond receding to the right of the pavilion (Tate impressions: T04616, T04617, T06140). Turner is said to have hoped in vain for one or both to be purchased by King George IV,5 whose elaborate fishing boat is shown in both views; this perhaps explains the large number of sketches here in the artist’s search for compositions to please his intended patron. A miniature copy in enamels by Henry Bone (1755–1834) of the first watercolour is in the Royal Collection; although its early provenance is not recorded, it must have been made .6

As the two watercolours were exhibited in 1829, Turner must have used this sketchbook at Virginia Water before he filled the rest of it on his 1830 tour of the Midlands (starting with views of Oxford working in from the opposite end). Fort Belvedere, near the lake, was extensively remodelled between 1827 and 1829, but it is shown in its original form on folio 83 recto (D22132; Turner Bequest CCXXXVIII 81); conversely, the Five Arch Bridge shown on folios 81 recto and 88 recto (D22128, D22141; Turner Bequest CCXXXVIII 79, 86) was only completed in 1827, which thus seems the likely date of Turner’s sketches.