JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER, R.A.

(1775-1851)

A First Rate Taking in Stores

1818

pencil and watercolour, heightened with white on paper

28.6 x 39.7cm

inscribed: J.M.W. Turner 1818

P.99

Apart from its great beauty, this is one of Turner’s most famous watercolours and perhaps the best documented.  Turner’s dislike of being watched while painting is well known but he made an extraordinary exception in this case. 

In November 1818 Turner was staying at Farnley Hall in Yorkshire, the home of his friend and most prolific patron, Walter Fawkes. One morning at breakfast Fawkes said to Turner: 'I want you to make me a drawing of the ordinary dimensions that will give some idea of the size of a man of war'.  The idea evidently appealed to Turner, for with a chuckle, he said to Fawkes’s eldest son, Hawksworth, a boy of about 15: 'Come along Hawkey, and we will see what we can do for Papa' and so the boy sat by his side the whole morning watching the evolution of A First Rate Taking in Stores.

His description of the way Turner went to work was extraordinary:

He began by pouring wet paint on to the paper until it was saturated, he tore, he scratched, he scrabbled at it in a kind of frenzy and the whole thing was chaos – but gradually and as if by magic the lovely ship, with all its exquisite minutia [sic] came into being and by luncheon time the drawing was taken down in triumph.

This manuscript account by Mrs Edith Mary Fawkes (daughter-in-law of Walter Fawkes’s third son, the Rev. Ayscough Fawkes) tallies with Thornbury’s description (source unknown) of how Turner 'tore up the sea with his eagle-claw of a thumbnail' when painting this watercolour 'between breakfast and lunch'.

EJ

PROVENANCE: Painted for Walter Fawkes (1769-1825); by descent to W.R. Fawkes; his sale Christie’s 2 July 1937 no.44 bought Tooth’s; sold to David (later Viscount) Eccles, for whom sold by Thos. Agnew &  Sons Ltd, to Gallery, January 1953.

EXHIBITIONS: 45 Grosvenor Place (Fawkes’s London House), 1819 no.20; Leeds, Music Hall, 1839, no.14; Old Masters, London, Grafton Galleries, 1911, no.205; 65^th Annual Watercolour Exhibition, London,  Thos. Agnew, 1938, no.148; 70^th Annual Watercolour Exhibition, London, Thos. Agnew, 1943, no.71; Centenary Loan Exhibition of Watercolour Drawings by J.M.W. Turner; R.A., London, Thos. Agnew, 1951, no.46; 80^th Annual Watercolour Exhibition,, London, Thos. Agnew, 1953, no.83; Norwich Castle Museum, 1954; Primitives to Picasso, London, Royal Academy,  1962 no.382; Watercolours from Bedford, Norwich, Castle Museum, 1965, no.57; 150^th Anniversary Loan Exhibition of Paintings and Watercolours by J.M.W. Turner, R..A., London, Thos. Agnew & Sons Ltd, 1967, no.54; Bicentenary Exhibition 1768-1968, London, Royal Academy, 1968-9, no.204; Turner 1775-1851, London, Royal Academy, 1974-5, no.194; J.M.W. Turner, Paris, Grand Palais, (British Council), 1983-4, no.129; Masters of the Sea: British Marine Watercolours, New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, London, National Maritime Museum, 1987, no.77; The Art of Seeing: John Ruskin & the Victorian Eye, Phoenix,  Phoenix Art Museum, Indianapolis, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, 1993; Watercolours by J.M.W. Turner R..A., London, Thos. Agnew & Sons Ltd, 1994, no.2; Making and Meaning: Turner & ‘The Fighting Temeraire’, London, National Gallery, 1995, no.14; J.M.W. Turner,  Canberra, National Gallery of Australia, Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1996, no.50; Turner: The Great Watercolours, London, Royal Academy, 2000-1, no.47.

REFERENCES: W. Thornbury, The Life of J.M.W. Turner, R.A., 1877, pp.239,589; F. Wedmore, Turner and Ruskin, 1900. vol.II, p.290; C.F. Bell. A list of the works contributed to Public Exhibitions by J.M.W. Turner, R.A., 1901, p.169; Sir W. Armstrong, Turner, 1902, pp.67-8,253; E.T. Cook & A. Wedderburn (eds.), The Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols., 1903-12, v, p.33; xii, p.386, pl.21; xiii, p.48; xxx, p.352; A.J. Finberg, ‘Turner’s Water-Colours at Farnley Hall’, The Studio, 1912, part I, pp.10-11,25 & pl.viii; C. Clare, J.M.W. Turner, his Life and Work, 1951, p.65; H.P.R. Finberg (ed.), A.J. Finberg, The Life of J.M.W Turner, 1961, 2^nd edition, pp249-50; M. Butlin, Turner Watercolours, 1962, pp.10,28, pl.5; A. Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, 1979, pp.104, 357, no.499; J. Gage, J.M.W. Turner – A Wonderful Range of Mind, 1987, pp.159-60; A. Wilton, Turner in his Time, 1987, p.114; E. Shanes, Turner: the Masterworks, 1990, p.72, pl.73; C.  Finch, 19^th Century Watercolours, 1991, pp.47-8; E. Shanes et al, Turner The Great Watercolours, 2000, p.135 repr. p.134; E. Shanes, ‘Turner and the creation of his First-rate in a Few Hours A Kind of Frenzy ?’, Apollo, March 2001, pp.13-15, illus no.1.

See the entry for The Loss of an East Indiaman, for the suggestion that it and A First Rate Taking in Stores were painted as pendants.

Copyright © Trustees of Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford.

Extract taken from Watercolours and Drawings, Cecil Higgins Art Gallery by Evelyn Joll.