News & events | Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd

21 May 2020

We are excited to announce a new online exhibition devoted to pages from one JMW Turner's last sketchbooks. The exhibition includes ten sheets from two sketchbooks that were disassembled and pasted into an album in 1884, they have remained together ever since. As such, they represent perhaps the last opportunity to acquire multiple sheets from a single sketchbook by Turner. Left by Turner to his Margate landlady and companion, Caroline Sophia Booth, they constitute the remains of two of Turner's last sketchbooks, they are therefore some of the very few sketchbook drawings that did not pass with the contents of his studio into the Turner Bequest. This exhibition reconstructs one of these sketchbooks, named by Ian Warrell the ‘Canterbury, Rochester and Maidstone sketchbook.’ The title of our show is therefore apposite, as these drawings come from one of Turner’s last sketchbooks and represent one of the last concentrations of sketchbook pages not in a public collection. The drawings themselves may be modest - almost fragmentary at times - but they show Turner at the height of his powers, rapidly capturing the familiar landscape of Kent and communicating these views without the use of watercolour. As such, these ten sheets offer remarkable insights into Turner's working practices, his vision and the role drawing occupied in his own art. Whilst scholars have long known the drawings, they have not previously been seriously discussed - the subjects of several of the sheets are identified here for the first time - we therefore hope that this exhibition will shed some new light on late Turner and his use of drawing. Read on for a more detailed discussion of the pages and their context.