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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Venice, Austria and Southern Germany ... > Grand Canal and Giudecca Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Splashes or Offsets of Colour 1840

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Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Inside Front Cover:
Splashes or Offsets of Colour 1840
D41533
Watercolour on white wove paper, 220 x 320 mm
Watermark ‘J Whatman | 1834’
Inscribed by ?Turner in pencil ‘R’ top left
Inscribed in pencil by Ralph Nicholson Wornum ‘two out 1868 | RN.W=’ above centre, upside down
Inscribed in red ink ‘2’ circled towards top right, ascending vertically (now blurred)
Inscribed in pencil ‘Cover of Roll sketch Book of Venice | CCCXV (Sched.13).’ towards top left
Stamped in black ‘CCCXV’ top left
The sight splashes or offsets on this otherwise blank inside cover reflect Turner’s extensive use of watercolour when this sketchbook was intact (see the Introduction).
The dated and initialled inscription ‘two out 1868 | RN.W=’ is by Ralph Nicholson Wornum,1 then Keeper of the National Gallery, and typical of his minimal notes relating to pages extracted from numerous Turner Bequest sketchbooks. As Tate D32120–D32129 (Turner Bequest CCCXV 4–13) had already been exhibited separately, this reference is presumably to D32134 and D32178 (CCCXV 18, CCCXVI 41), selected by Wornum in November 1868 for the three touring Loan Collections from the Bequest which commenced in the following year.2
As well as the ‘2’ noted above there are possibly traces of other characters or words in red ink, presumably inscribed by a later hand, which may have been washed away in the 1928 Tate Gallery flood.
Technical notes:
There is some dark rubbing across slight creases towards the bottom left. A small, irregular brown mark at the foot of the gutter appears to be a stain rather than watercolour, and continues inside the back cover (D41534). The 1834 Whatman watermark here matches those on numerous pages once bound within the sketchbook.
The continuous white paper paste-downs are laminated to the book’s marbled paper outer covers, which lack any drawing or inscription by Turner and are thus without Tate accession numbers; see the technical notes in the sketchbook’s Introduction.

Matthew Imms
September 2018

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Splashes or Offsets of Colour 1840 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2018, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-splashes-or-offsets-of-colour-r1196826, accessed 27 April 2024.