An erotic bonfire: The story of JMW Turner’s nude paintings

Posted On May 27, 2025May 27, 2025

In the winter of 1858, the eminent Victorian art critic John Ruskin wrote a letter to his friend and the director of the National Gallery, Ralph Wornum, in which he confessed to a dramatic act: he had, he claimed, destroyed a cache of erotic drawings by JMW Turner. “I am satisfied,” Ruskin wrote solemnly, “that you had no other course than to burn them, both for the sake of Turner’s reputation… and for your own peace.”

According to Ruskin, only a few select examples had been preserved, wrapped carefully in brown paper and marked as evidence of “a failure of mind”.

For over a century, this story was accepted as truth – a testament to the conflicted morality of the Victorian age, and to Ruskin’s towering role as gatekeeper of artistic virtue. But in 2004, that long-standing myth went up in smoke.

Turner expert Ian Warrell, of the Tate, announced his discovery after painstaking research: the infamous bonfire of Turner’s erotic sketches never happened. Not a single match had been struck. The drawings – around a hundred of them – had not only survived, but had been carefully and cryptically catalogued, through a series of impossible number codes that Ruskin had devised, and tucked away in the Tate’s archives. Some were even hidden between the pages of Turner’s notebooks, hidden in plain sight.

For the first time in over a century, the public gained a glimpse of Turner’s erotic imagination. The drawings, now published in Warrell’s book Turner’s Secret Sketches, reveal a candid and rawly human side of the artist. They include images of naked women, anatomical studies, and intimate encounters between figures – many likely inspired by visits to brothels or encounters in London’s more shadowy corners.

To understand the scandal, we must first understand Ruskin. One of the most powerful intellectuals of the Victorian era, Ruskin was not only Turner’s most passionate advocate – he had written the six-volume Modern Painters in defence of the artist – but also a product of his time’s deeply repressive sexual morality. When he encountered Turner’s private sketches, the shock was, by his own account, profound. He didn’t just dislike them, he was haunted by them… 

Why did Ruskin fabricate the bonfire? One theory, Warrell suggests, is fear. In 1857, just a year before the supposed destruction, Britain introduced its first Obscene Publications Act, criminalising the distribution of explicit material. Ruskin may have feared legal consequences or public scandal if the sketches were discovered. Yet, rather than truly destroying them, he quietly buried them, undoubtedly with the knowledge that some day someone would discover them. Maybe he worried he would regret it, or that someday such drawings would be socially accepted and celebrated.

Warrell’s research basically involved high-profile detective work: sifting through over 30,000 sheets of Turner’s work, comparing fold lines, matching sealing wax remnants, and linking loose pages to notebooks. Slowly, the myth unravelled.

Today, what once appalled Ruskin is viewed through a very different lens. These sketches don’t tarnish Turner’s legacy, rather, they enrich it. They reveal the complexity of an artist who, like his landscapes, was drawn to extremes of light and shadow.

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