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

This view is in the garden of Charles James Fox’s villa at St Anne’s Hill, near Chertsey in Surrey. It was the basis of a vignette watercolour (Tate D27688; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 171),1 engraved for page 214 of the 1834 edition of Samuel Rogers’s Poems (Tate impressions: T05123, T06169)2 as the tail-piece to ‘Lines Written in Westminster Abbey, October 10, 1806’ (‘After the Funeral of the Right Hon. Charles James Fox’); the engraving is generally referred to as St Anne’s Hill (II). For more on Fox, St Anne’s Hill and Rogers, see the sketchbook’s Introduction.

In the vignette, the broad view here was condensed into a squarish composition with the left-hand trellis brought nearer to the urn, and the right-hand tree trunk replaced by more trellis with the wire framework of an arch overhead; a curved seat was introduced in the foreground within the arbour, with books and a parasol to suggest a human presence, and flowers growing up the trellis. (See also the partial elevation of an urn and pedestal on folio 29 recto (D20593; Turner Bequest CCXXV 29.) As Rogers put it in his poem (page 213):

Another engraving, St Anne’s Hill (I), was based on the drawing on folio 26 recto opposite (D20589).

Unusually, this leaf is stamped with its Turner Bequest number on the verso (i.e. the present face). The otherwise blank recto is inscribed in brown ink ‘61’ within a circle at the bottom right, in red ink ‘[?70] 970’ at the bottom left, possibly by John Ruskin, in connection with the loan of the page to Oxford, and also in ?blue pencil ‘202’ at the top centre (partly erased).