No contemporary portrait exists of Turpin, who as a notorious but unremarkable figure was not considered sufficiently important to be immortalised. An engraving in one edition of Bayes' 1739 publication, of a man hiding in a cave, is sometimes supposed to be him, but the closest description that exists is that given by John Wheeler, of "a fresh coloured man, very much marked with the small pox, about five feet nine inches high ... wears a blue grey coat and a light coloured wig". An E-FIT of Turpin, created from such reports, was published by the Castle Museum in York in 2009.