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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner East Cowes Castle: The Library, with a Harp Recital 1827

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
East Cowes Castle: The Library, with a Harp Recital 1827
D22705
Turner Bequest CCXLIV 43
Gouache and watercolour on blue wove paper, 140 x 189 mm
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram towards bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCXLIV 43’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This is among dozens of blue paper studies made in and around East Cowes Castle, presumably during the same visit. For more on the various aspects of the house (demolished in about 1950), and its lost grounds as depicted by Turner, see the Introduction to this subsection. The present colour study was traditionally associated with Turner’s 1827 stay at Petworth in Sussex, after his Isle of Wight visit, where he produced a series similar in technique,1 addressed elsewhere in this catalogue.
There are a few drawings now identified as East Cowes interiors (see also Tate D20851, D20852, D22690, D22694, D22761; Turner Bequest CCXXVII a 48, 49, CCXLIV 28, 32, 99). This and D22690 apparently show the library with a woman in black seated with a harp, playing to a group of seated men and women; ink drawings of the room are D20851 and D20852.
1
See Finberg 1909, II, pp.744–6, CCXLIV 1–116, ‘Petworth Water Colours’, c.1830.
Verso:
Blank; inscribed by John Ruskin in ink ‘239 | O’ bottom right; inscribed in pencil ‘16c’ right of centre; stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram above ‘CCXLIV – 43’ bottom left.
Ruskin’s number signifies that the sheet was in one of the parcels of unmounted sketches within the Turner Bequest CCXLIV grouping. Those marked with this particular number were described by him as ‘Colour on grey. Petworth. Worse’; as Finberg notes, this is in relation to those marked ‘238 | O’, described as ‘Inferior’.1

Matthew Imms
November 2015

1
See Finberg 1909, II, p.744.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘East Cowes Castle: The Library, with a Harp Recital 1827 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 2015, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2016, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-east-cowes-castle-the-library-with-a-harp-recital-r1182719, accessed 26 April 2024.