What was John Constable up to at 8.30am on 26 September 1814? If his sketchbook can be trusted, the great landscape painter was in Dedham Vale on the Essex-Suffolk border sketching the valley below, using quick pencil strokes to capture shadows in the foreground, trees in the middle distance and a faraway steeple breaching the cloud-dappled sky. Alongside the sketch, which he later used as the basis for his painting Stour Valley and Dedham Church, he noted the date and exact time he committed it to paper.
It’s this sense of immediacy, of peering over an artist’s shoulder as inspiration strikes, that makes flicking through sketchbooks so exciting, though the ideas are not always so fully formed. In his sketchbook from the 1880s, working on his series The Legend of the Briar Rose, Edward Burne-Jones tries out several arrangements of a knight and sleeping guards before arriving at a satisfactory composition.
And that’s just the preparatory drawings. Sketchbooks are full of diverse and unusual details, not all of them artistic, as a new book from the collection of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum makes clear.
Featuring work from the 15th century to the present by luminaries such as Constable, Leonardo da Vinci and Beatrix Potter, as well as lesser-known painters and talented amateurs, The Artist’s Sketchbook offers a fascinating insight into the recesses of the artistic mind. Some pages are devoted to learning, practice and experimentation. Others are taken up with architectural drawings, engineering designs and travel reportage. There’s plenty of marginalia, too, providing extra detail on sketches or noting something else entirely – in George Cruikshank’s 1851 sketchbook, amid the drawings, he keeps track of his accounts.
“It’s the process that we’re interested in, how art is made,” says Jenny Gaschke, senior curator of paintings and drawings at the V&A, who edited the book. She and her contributors drew from nearly 350 sketchbooks in the museum’s collection, narrowing down to 76 artists. “Leonardo da Vinci sticks out a bit at the beginning, almost too much,” she says, “but to us the unknown names were of the same level of interest.”
Leonardo was an early adopter of sketchbooks, which began to circulate as stationery evolved out of manuscript culture from the 13th century onwards, but according to Gaschke it was only in the 19th century, “with the increasingly industrialised production of paper but also of drawing materials”, that they became widely available.
The book form is significant in its unifying effect. “It’s about having these sketches together between the covers so you can go back and forward,” says Gaschke. “Sketchbooks have been compared to families: the covers are the parents and the pages inside are the siblings, and they do all interrelate.”
The fact that sketchbooks can be closed and, in some cases, secured with a clasp makes them “immensely private”, she adds, “and that causes an interesting dilemma when publishing them, because the artist didn’t intend them to be displayed. As with a writer’s journals, should we read them? But, of course, we do.”
If privacy poses a dilemma here, so does visibility: the V&A’s sketchbook collection privileges white, male British and European artists, and accordingly the book features few women and even fewer artists of colour. Gaschke acknowledges the limitations. “I think it’s a very good exercise to highlight those areas of shortcoming and to say: ‘This helps us inform our collecting policy,’” she says.
But the book does show how important sketchbooks were as creative outlets to women in centuries past. In an entry from 1766, we see a Mrs Hughes learning to draw from her teacher Mr Ryland, who adds drawings for her to copy – after a shaky start, she learns to replicate her master so well that they’re almost indistinguishable. One leatherbound book from 1818, meanwhile, is the only known artistic attribution to Sophia Jenkins, who filled it with brilliantly colourful paintings of butterflies and moths.
Such obscurity is part of the book’s appeal – these images can’t easily be found in galleries or even online, though you can make an appointment to view sketchbooks in the V&A’s study rooms. Sharing “these more fragile, shy-of-the-light collections with our audiences” was one of Gaschke’s main reasons for creating the book. Another was to “whet the appetite: we want to encourage everyone to pick up a sketchbook and give it a try”. Even in the age of phone cameras and digital sketching software, the old-fashioned sketchbook is, she insists, very much still alive: “It’s a brilliant way of capturing in intense but fleeting moments what’s around you.”
The Artist’s Sketchbook: Inside the Creative Mind by Jenny Gaschke is published by Thames & Hudson (£40). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
