Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Stern of the ‘Argonaut’, in Two Positions circa 1805
Pencil on cream laid paper, 185 x 118 mm
Inscribed ?by Turner in ink, illegibly and in pencil on the ship’s stern beneath the windows of the great cabin ‘ARGO...’
Stamped in black ‘LXXXVII’ top right, descending vertically
See note to folio 10 of this sketchbook (D05387; Turner Bequest LXXXVII 29). Here Turner has sketched both a frontal and starboard view of the stern of a warship. The first carries the partial inscription ‘ARGO...’ indicating the ship’s name. Rather than the Argo, a fifth-rate warship that was sent for repairs to Portsmouth Dockyard in the winter of 1803–4 and then to Africa in 1806, she is more likely to be the Argonaut, which at the time of Turner’s trip to see the returning Victory was serving, as she had since 1797, as a hospital ship in the River Medway. Possibly he went on board in the hope of interviewing survivors of the battle. The Argonaut, a third-rate of sixty-four guns, had originally been the French ship Jason. Following her capture by Rear-Admiral Sir Samuel Hood in the Mona Passage, between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, in 1782, she had been commissioned into the British Navy before retiring from active service.
David Blayney Brown
January 2006
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
