This new facsimile edition of J.M.W. Turner’s final intact sketchbook is more than a publication—it is a portal into the twilight years of this great master’s career. Beautifully produced and faithful to the original, this edition brings Turner’s intimate, final sketches to a broader audience.
Turner (1775-1851), famously never far from his sketchbooks, was to produce more than 300 during his lifetime. This volume, in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, captures a pivotal moment in 1845 as he walked along the Kent coastline around Margate, a place to which he returned time and again. The sketches, created in the fluid and suggestive lines that characterise Turner’s later work, carry the immediacy of observation-fleeting impressions of light and form that hint at the sublime seascapes for which he is celebrated.
Accompanying the facsimile is a moving poem by British contemporary artist Tracey Emin, whose connection with Margate and Turner is personal and profound. Emin grew up amidst Margate’s bracing winds and shifting tides; her practice contrasts with Turner’s 19th-century gaze, connecting us to her emotional expressiveness.
The edition’s design contains blank pages and generous margins. This honours Turner’s spirit of creativity and invites readers to value a moment in time. It transforms from a simple binding into a living object with all of the spontaneity that Turner is capable of. This book is a hidden gem and a welcome addition to Turner’s legacy as an artist and observer. It celebrates the restless energy that animated his final years.
Turner’s Sketchbooks: A Window into the day to day Life of the Artist
Few relics offer quite as intimate a glimpse into the creative process as J.M.W. Turner’s sketchbooks. These modest volumes, many now in the Tate’s collection, are treasures of British art, capturing the unguarded brilliance of one of the 19th century’s most celebrated painters. They reveal Turner as a virtuoso of atmosphere and light and a tireless observer, recording fleeting impressions that would later crystallise into his most iconic works.
The sketchbooks are at once incredibly diverse and surprisingly consistent. They range in format from the small pocket-sized journals he carried on his extensive travels throughout Britain and Europe to larger, more formal books devoted to compositional studies. Yet all are bound together by Turner’s unflagging curiosity. Whether he was drawing the craggy peaks of the Alps, the teeming quays of London, or the translucent play of cloud and sun over the Thames, he approached each subject with wonder and urgency.
Often rapid and fluid, these sketches show Turner’s eye attuned to the essential. Using a minimum amount of strokes in graphite or watercolour, he distilled the landscapes into their elemental forms: hills became graceful arcs, rivers mere sinuous lines. Despite their economy, the sketches pulse with vitality. They are the foundation of Turner’s art, a direct conduit to the visual language he would later deploy in his finished paintings.
Turner’s European tours dominate most sketchbooks, especially those of Italy, France, and Switzerland. His studies of Venice’s shimmering light and dreamlike canals epitomise his capture of the ineffable. The Venetian sketches, often executed in soft washes of watercolour, are less preparatory works than standalone masterpieces, encapsulating the city’s ethereal beauty with unmatched subtlety.
The sketchbooks are more than visual records of impressions; they disclose something of Turner’s mental effort. Notes and marginalia indicate his deep interest in history, literature, and science. Much of his work relates to poetry and classical myths, evoking an understanding of how his paintings arose.
In preserving these sketchbooks, Turner has left behind a record not only of his artistry but also a means to understand his practice. They reveal the restless mind of an artist who constantly refines his vision, always in pursuit of the sublime.
Turner’s sketchbooks are raw, immediate, and endlessly inspiring. They remind us that even in his gestural marks, Turner could evoke a universe of expression. It is no wonder that artists from the Impressionists to the Abstract Expressionists were fascinated by his sketches.
. This would make a great Christmas present! – PCR Artlyst
Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art