Turner's Sketchbooks

JMW Turner travelled much through Europe and into North Africa. His sketchbooks acted as a diary and capture the artist at his most natural....

Turner's sketchbooks log his travelling
in delicate exquisite private drawings.
(Italics for the sketchbook's name and date.)
Hesperides (eighteen o five) depicts
the Thames near Isleworth with red sail barges
and a double rainbow: Sandycombe
and Yorkshire (eighteen nine) includes
his house at Twickers, Sandycombe Lodge, which
with help from John Soane he designed and which
still stands in South West London; Chemistry
and Apuleia (eighteen thirteen) has
his notes from William Nicholson's instruction
'Practical and Theoretical
Chemie', especially the recipe
for 'golden yellow', overuse of which
earned Turner criticism; Devonshire Coast
with its railway times and distances
and blank sheets which the artist drew on or
wrote poetry on; Val d'Aosta (eighteen
thirty-six) with a delightful sketch
of Reims Cathedral; Meuse and Moselle with
a map of riverside tows which he toured:
France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany
in (eighteen twenty-four); the same year is 
Old London Bridge in which an ink-wash sketch
depicts a Thameside church with spire reflected
in the water; eighteen twenty-five
produced his Thames with watercolour figures
in a punt beneath umbrellas; Dresden 
Copenhagen (eighteen thirty-five)
includes a view of Stettin from across
the Oder and on blank sheets opposite
the sketches German phrases for the tourist;
Gravesend Margate (eighteen thirty-two) 
is tall and narrow and used both for thumbnail
sketches and for panoramas. All
these books, each named by where the artist went,
are in Tate Britain at the Constable 
and Turner exhibition which contrasts
the artists. Constable remained at home,
but Turner saw the world and painted it.