We had a splendid study day in St Davids with the Welsh Stone Forum and the Cathedral library – blog post on that to follow, and there will be a more detailed report in the Newsletter.

We spent some time looking at Turner’s slightly misleading painting of the exterior of the Trinity chapel and the effigy to the east of the door – more detail on that at https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/joseph-mallord-william-turner-ra-1775-1851-200-c-16f44fba88?srsltid=AfmBOopdaYcYo37bepKaE7CkOq6aMukQ-W8Swxk5HHm6ZEaWP7FSiE4O. Click on the painting and you can zoom in. Several good points were made: as well as his representation of the effigy as a cadaver, the tracery panels on the tomb chest seem much taller in Turner’s painting than they are now, and he seems to have miscounted the tracery lancets above the door to the chapel.

That evening, we had a more detailed look at Turner’s preliminary sketch, which is in his notebooks in the Tate: see https://news.artnet.com/market/jmw-turner-watercolor-auction-2452792 for a zoomable reproduction. From this it is clear that the reinterpretation of the effigy as a cadaver was part of his original sketch. However, the tracery panels on the tomb chest are rather shorter in the preliminary sketch, and there is as a result more space between the effigy and the little plaque of the Crucifixion. Turner presumably felt that the original tomb chest was rather squat and added to its height in the final version. There is no detail of the lancets above the chapel door in the preliminary sketch, which explains his miscounting.

The sketch and the worked-up version nevertheless explain one oddity in the tomb chest. The inscription on the western panel is much more clearly cut than the very eroded inscription on the eastern panel. I had assumed that much of the western panel was replacement, but apparently the bit with the inscription is Dundry while the repair is a different stone. Turner’s painting suggests that the western section of the tomb chest had virtually collapsed and was thus protected by the slab under the effigy: this might well explain the better preservation of the lettering.

Maddy Gray