J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Thames sketchbooks c.1804-14 > Wey, Guildford Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Landscape with Diana and Actaeon 1805

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Landscape with Diana and Actaeon’ 1805
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 23 Recto:
Landscape with Diana and Actaeon 1805
D06213
Turner Bequest XCVIII 23
Pen and ink and brown wash on white laid paper, 117 x 182 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘23’ bottom left, descending vertically
Stamped in black ‘XCVIII 22’ bottom left, descending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
One of two variants of this composition in this sketchbook; the second follows on folio 24 (D06214). Hill’s identification of the subject as Diana and Actaeon is convincing. For other themes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses drawn by Turner around the same time, see the contemporary Hesperides (2) sketchbook (Tate D06865–D05869; Turner Bequest XCIV 13–17). However, there is a possibility that Turner’s ideas for Diana and Actaeon overlapped with those for his picture The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides exhibited in 1806 (Tate N00477).1 Hill also compares the landscape composition on folio 24 in the present book to sketches associated with that picture in another contemporary sketchbook, Hesperides (1).2 One of them (Tate D05821; Turner Bequest XCIII 32a), while probably mainly connected with the picture in its general arrangement, also seems to contain a stag torn apart by hounds and was thought to be of Diana and Actaeon by Finberg and by Kathleen Nicholson.3 In the present drawing, a figure on the left is clearly drawing a bow but in folio 24 the action is less explicit.
1
Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984, pp.44–6 no.57 (pl.67).
2
Hill 1993, p.168.
3
Kathleen Nicholson, Turner’s Classical Landscapes: Myth and Meaning, Princeton 1990, p.165; and for Ovidian subjects generally, pp.144–218.
Verso:
Blank

David Blayney Brown
July 2008

How to cite

David Blayney Brown, ‘Landscape with Diana and Actaeon 1805 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2008, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-landscape-with-diana-and-actaeon-r1130397, accessed 24 September 2024.