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

Inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, there are five bands of miscellaneous studies. The first shows what may be two aspects of the same gabled Baroque archway. In the second, various swiftly rendered figures are seen in and around a small boat. Next come various studies of what may be the same cart or barrow; here, the setting is specified as Antwerp, although the significance of the note of what Finberg plausibly read as ‘Pictures of the Show’,1 seemingly referring to an array of blank rectangles on the cart or perhaps a stall, is not so clear. Compare Turner’s longer inscription about a ‘a whole shop on a barrow’ earlier in the tour at Amsterdam, on folio 86 verso (D19010). Below is a study of a large cart drawn by draught horses in heavy collars.

These studies may relate to the Antwerp scene on folio 197 recto opposite (D19230). Below, church towers in the city are seen upriver to the south, with figures near a moored sailing boat in the foreground. The vertical feature to the left of the mast may be the funnel of a steamer, as on the recto (D19229). For other views of Antwerp here and elsewhere, see under folio 188 recto (D19212), and see the sketchbook’s Introduction for discussion of its many figure scenes, and studies of individuals, their costume and headgear.