A Woodcutter in Knockholt Park, Kent

This work, although untraced for some years after being sold at Christie's London in 1916, was known from a photograph on p. 21 of vol. 4 of A.J. Finberg's Scrapbooks in the British Museum (op. cit.); it reappeared in 1985. From its size, medium, type of paper and the form of inscription on the back, it is clearly one of the group of studies made at Knockholt and elsewhere in Kent. Turner knew the landscape artist and drawing master William Frederick Wells (1762-1836), who lived at Knockholt, from 1800 or earlier, and it was Wells who seems to have helped to persuade Turner to begin work on the Liber Studiorum in the autumn of 1806. In the first edition of Butlin and Joll, 1977, pp. 102-3, this group of works, or rather those in the Turner Bequest which were all that were known at the time, were dated circa 1805-6, but this was queried by Andrew Wilton, who dated the series to circa 1799-1800 (The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, Fribourg and London 1979, p. 268, under nos. p. 154-159); this revised dating was accepted in the revised edition of Butlin and Joll of 1984, with the proviso that the dating should be extended to 1801, at least for the works showing the interior at Knockholt where Wells did not move into his cottage until that year (op.cit., 1984 edn., pp. 25-7). Of the six works in the British Museum included in Butlin and Joll 1977 (p. 103, nos. 154-9), all but one bear inscriptions similar to that on the present work: they are numbered '101', '104' and '106'. By the time the 1984 edition appeared these further examples had been recognized and were acquired by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, like the other which was already in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Butlin and Joll 1984, p. 27, nos. 35a-35c ; the British Museum examples were renumbered 35e-35j); as two, if not all three, of these works are laid down it has not been possible to check whether they bear inscriptions on the reverse.
In the present drawing the use of oil paint is minimal. A watercolour version of A Beech Wood with Gipsies round a Camp Fire, BJ 35a, was retrieved from a waste paper basket by Well's daughter, Clarissa Anne (1787-1883) and passed to a descendant; it had been torn in half which suggests that Turner may have been dissatisfied with a purely watercolour technique and added oil for its additional richness of effect (for the watercolour see Butlin and Joll, 1984, p. 26 and R. Yardley, 'Picture Notes', Turner Studies, vol. 4 no. 1, Summer 1984, p. 58-9, fig. 3).