TEFAF opens next Thursday and the team in Clifford Street are busy getting ready to head off to hang our stand. We are taking some exceptional works including masterpieces by J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough, William Blake and Samuel Palmer. Several pictures on our stand were not included in our 2015 exhibition catalogue including a striking watercolour study made by Turner in the late 1830s.

This study is part of a series Turner made on a distinctive buff-coloured paper. The coloured paper gave Turner a mid-tone from which he could explore atmospheric effects, either real or imagined. Another sheet in this series is preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and has a provenance dating back to Turner’s Margate land-lady, Mrs Booth, who was the companion of his final years.  The Fitzwilliam watercolour is on a larger piece of paper and shares much the same palette range in its use of flecks of red and blue, along with brilliant areas of white gouache.

Given the tonal and stylistic similarities of the Fitzwilliam watercolour, its origins with Mrs Booth are possibly an indication of how our Sky Study originally came onto the market.  The connection with Mrs Booth could also suggest that the studies were made at Margate, where Turner is known to have repeatedly painted the sun rising and setting from his temporary lodgings overlooking the harbour. These works are increasingly being understood as a vital foundation for the new directions of his last years.