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

This page is a rather untidy tangle of two sets of inscriptions, written by Turner at intervals in pencil and black ink. The first set has been inscribed with the sketchbook upturned, and shows a list of accounts. These financial calculations are most likely connected to similarly formatted accounts written on the folio opposite (Tate D20079; Turner Bequest CCXVI 269a). They probably represent income or expenditure and are dated for the year 1824, for the months of May and July. The entries in bold represent those inscribed in black ink. It is transcribed thus:

           Marsh

The last entry of these accounts is dated 27 July 1824, just a fortnight or so before Turner set off for the continent to begin his tour of the Meuse-Moselle region. As Cecilia Powell writes, ‘it seems entirely natural’ that the artist ‘should have chosen this particular moment to take stock of his financial position’ before the commencement of an extensive tour, and ‘that he should have done so in the same notebook’ that he would use to record the tour itself.1

A few weeks later then, on this same sheet, Turner inscribed a dated itinerary of the 1824 Meuse-Moselle tour, writing out the schedule either in instalments as he went along or once the tour was complete. The itinerary was inscribed with the sketchbook turned in reverse to the accounts, and becomes legible when viewed in accordance with the foliation. Given that Turner’s sketchbooks and the drawings within them are rarely dated, this itinerary is a very valuable document indeed and has enabled art historians to more or less identify the exact days of each drawing’s creation. The schedule begins at 10 August 1824, when Turner left England, and concludes on 15 September at Calais. It is transcribed thus:

                                                  W      9   Calais
                                                  T     10   Abbeville
                                                  F      11   Dieppe
                                         S     12   Dieppe Samedi
                                                 13   Abb
                                                 14   Cal
                                                 15’

At several points Turner has added the initials of the days of the week, or shortened versions of them, next to the date of the month and place name. This apparently straightforward format is complicated by the fact that the artist inscribes three of those days of the week in French with the others in English and, in addition, that some of these annotations are in fact incorrect. The viewer will notice that the entries for 14 August, destination Huy, and 21 August, Metz, bear the inscription ‘Sam’ written to the right of the place name. In 1909 Finberg transcribed these annotations as ‘Sun’ to signify ‘Sunday’, and regarded them as applying to the dates on their right (i.e. – Sam 26 Luxemburg’). Decades later, in 1991, Cecilia Powell was the first scholar to identify that Finberg was incorrect on this matter, and that Turner was actually inscribing ‘Sam’ rather than ‘Sun’ to signify the French for Saturday: ‘Samedi’.2 Powell also discovered that the inscriptions ‘Sam’ applied to the dates on their left, for example: ‘14 Huy – Sam’ rather than ‘–Sam 26 Luxemburg’.3 Turner himself also made errors in his own annotations. The entries ‘W 9 Calais’ (signifying Wednesday 9 September at Calais, ‘T 10 Abbeville’, Thursday 10 September at Abbeville, and so on are incorrect. The 9th of September is in fact a Thursday, the 10th a Friday, and the 12th (labelled ‘S’ and annotated ‘Samedi’ for Saturday) is actually a Sunday.

Powell’s careful re-reading and correction of the itinerary enabled her to demonstrate that Finberg’s original dating of the first Meuse-Moselle tour was not 1826, as he had catalogued it, but rather 1824. For more information on the dating of this tour see the general Introduction to this tour.