John Doman Turner

Supporting notes:

“After being introduced by art critic Frank Rutter, who described Turner as ‘an amateur with a remarkable gift for watercolour’, he received artistic training from Spencer Gore. Turner would send Gore his drawings and, in return for 5 shillings, Gore would respond with letters critiquing Turner’s work.

The Tate Archive reading room has copies of 30 to 40 letters written by Spencer Gore to John Doman Turner over five years, between 1908 and 1913, transcribed from the original Gore collection. Also included is a letter sent from Turner to Gore.

The first letter is dated 8th June 1908, sent from Garth House, Hertingfordbury. Gore explains how the tuition will work and then describes how Turner should mark his work so that it can be referred to in his critiques: ‘Number each drawing so that I can refer to… Draw anything that interests you.’

Looking at early sketchbook drawings of Turner’s, I noticed several works have numbers associated with them, which appear to correspond with the numbers in Gore’s critiques. I’ve been able to identify up to work No. 685, but the letters refer to work No. 900. This suggests that Turner completed over 900 works over five years.

Tuition by Walter Sickert

John Doman Turner was also tutored by Walter Sickert (1860–1942) after Gore recommended he attend his evening classes at Westminster School of Art in 1908.

Sickert had two nights of teaching a week (Mondays and Wednesdays), taking two parallel figure classes each evening, one for women and another for men. He taught drawing and painting from life.

Teaching provided Sickert with an outlet for two of his great enthusiasms, performing to an audience and talking about the practical business of making pictures. He seldom went around each student in turn but would ‘pounce’ on a particular pupil and then deliver a spontaneous lecture on their work that everyone else could listen to. Drawings, he insisted, must be made to the scale of vision, advising the students to ‘mark off the size of the model on their drawing boards. They then should follow three steps: ‘the tentative line’, ‘the ‘shading’, and the ‘definitive line’. Sickert would write these on the top of his or his students’ paper.

A drawing in Turner’s sketchbook titled ‘study of face and hair only’ looks like a drawing from or inspired by one of Walter Sickert’s evening classes; it is dated 8th December 1908, from 9.25 pm to 10.45 pm.

Gore was impressed with what he saw: ‘That’s it. Try and draw the features exactly. I think you have improved enormously.’”

Source: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/john-doman-turner-letters-to-the-forgotten-camden-towner