J.M.W. Turner: The 'Wilson' Sketchbook

Turner's illuminating 'Wilson' sketchbook. Turner's sketchbooks were private things which he kept to himself. They might live for some time in his coat pockets or travel bags, to be pulled out as need arose. In the studio, they served as memory banks for future work. Of the nearly three hundred sketchbooks in Turner's house at the time of his death and now in the care of the Clore Gallery, the little book here reproduced is one of the most delightful and fascinating. It marks an important stage in the development of Turner's practice as a draughtsman and was in use when he was only twenty-one years old. It is a working notebook in which the pressing demands of an increasingly fertile imagination are given expression as it forges a new language for itself: a language that was radically to affect the history of both water-colour and oil painting in the romantic period and long afterwards. Originally marked with