Theme · Working method
Turner's Sketchbooks: Three Hundred Books and Sixty Years of Looking
More than three hundred sketchbooks came to the nation with the Bequest. They are small, hard-used, and the reason the late paintings work.
What survives
Over three hundred intact sketchbooks are held in the Turner Bequest today, alongside many thousands of loose sheets. Most of them are small enough to be carried in a coat pocket, and between them they span roughly sixty years of travel through Britain, France, Switzerland, the Rhineland and northern Italy.
How he used them
Mainly for rapid pencil notes taken on foot or from a moving coach: the line of a hill, the arrangement of a town, the rigging of a particular ship. He annotated pages with place names and occasional colour notes, indexed the books himself, and returned to them for decades afterwards.
Why they matter
They are also the evidence that the late dissolution of form rests upon observation instead of replacing it altogether. A canvas exhibited in 1840 may well derive from a pencil drawing made back in 1817, and the connection between them is often traceable page by page through the surviving books.
Questions
Are the sketchbooks on display?
Only a rotating selection, and that by necessity. Works on paper cannot be permanently exposed to light without fading, so Tate shows changing groups from the Bequest in the Clore Gallery and not any fixed display, which means that a particular book or page may well not be out when you visit.
How many sketchbooks did Turner leave?
More than three hundred intact books survive in the Turner Bequest, together with many thousands of loose sheets. Most of them are small enough to be carried in a coat pocket, and between them they cover roughly sixty years of his travel through Britain, France, Switzerland, the Rhineland and northern Italy.