Tate appeals to Turner watercolour owners

The Tate is appealing to private owners of Turner watercolours to contact them to help complete a catalogue of the artist’s oeuvre on the web. Already the Tate’s own 30,000 paintings and works on paper from the Turner Bequest are all illustrated on the net (www.tate.org.uk/collections), but the gallery wants to widen the project to include all Turners. Although the result will not be a full scholarly catalogue raisonné, it will provide the basic details of title, medium, dimensions, date, location (where public) and references to major publications. So far the Tate has data on a further 200 paintings and 2,000 works on paper in other collections. Around 400 other works (mainly watercolours) were recorded at some point, but their present locations remain unknown—and in some cases they have remained untraced since the Victorian era. The Tate is therefore calling on private owners to come forward with images for their web catalogue (owners can contact the gallery in confidence at andrew.tullis@tate.org.uk). The “Turner Worldwide” catalogue should be available on the web in April.