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TURNER’S Sketchbooks
W
hen T1rner died in Decem4er 1851 only a fraction of his life’s work had been seen by his contemporaries. Piled up in boxes in his studio, and running along several shelves above the stacks of unsold or unfinished canvases, were around three hundred sketchbooks charting his life and his travels during the previous sixty-two years. The contents of these books amounted to thousands of pages of sketches, generally in pencil, but occasionally worked with bursts of extravagant colour. Turner had jealously sought to maintain a mystery about his creative processes, so hardly anyone had been permitted to look inside these books during his lifetime. This is the first time that such a rich selection of sketches has appeared in one volume.
TURNER’S Sketchbooks
an warrell is an independent curator, specialising in British art of the nineteenth century. He worked at Tate for over twentyfive years, curating exhibitions about many aspects of the work of J.M.W. Turner. He is the author of Turner’s Secret Sketches.
‘The Turner Sketch-Books are as valuable,
in their way, as, say, a discovery of diaries by Shakespeare ’ charles lewis hind
T
urner’s sketchbooks ofer perhaps the most appealing introduction to the artist. More than three hundred survive intact, mostly in the artist’s own bequest at Tate Britain. They permit us to look over Turner’s shoulder, and to witness the origins and development of ideas that can be traced through to his major paintings. All aspects of Turner’s life and art can be found on the pages of these notebooks, which range in size from small pocket books, used for the most personal notes, to cumbersome albums containing presentation sketches. Wherever he went on his exhaustive travels in Britain and Europe, Turner was never without a sketchbook. This book is the first to survey the full range of Turner’s sketchbooks, illustrating pages selected from over a hundred, beginning with his teenage eforts and culminating in the atmospheric colour studies of his last years, charting his final travels in Venice, Switzerland and northern France. In addition to those at Tate, the few books preserved in other museum collections are also featured, including the ‘Channel’ sketchbook of 1845, now at the Yale Center for British Art, which only resurfaced on the art market in 1986.
IAN WARRELL
UK £24.99 US $45.00 CAN $50.00 ISBN 978-1-84976-295-3
IAN WARRELL
TATE039_P0271EDTurnerSketchbooksNew.indd 1
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