Joseph Mallord William Turner

Engraved:
Etching and mezzotint by Turner, ‘Æsacus and Hesperie | Vide Ovid Met^s. Book XI.’, published Turner, 1 January 1819 (see main catalogue entry)

As noted in the lettering of Turner’s Liber Studiorum print as published, the story of Aesacus and Hesperie is related in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a source of several designs based on stories of love and/or transformation: the others are Cephalus and Procris and Glaucus and Scylla (see Tate D08144, D08170; Turner Bequest CXVII P, CXVIII P), and Appulia in Search of Apullus, Pan and Syrinx and Narcissus and Echo.1

The present composition is Turner’s only known treatment of the episode: Aesacus sees Hesperie drying her hair by the river; she subsequently flees at his approach and is fatally bitten by a snake, whereupon Aesacus tries to commit suicide by jumping from a sea cliff but is transformed into a diving bird.2 There are two pencil and ink studies of Hesperie (with her head turned away) in the Aesacus and Hesperie sketchbook (Tate D40932; Turner Bequest CLXIX, inside front cover), which comprises paper watermarked 1817.3 Aesacus’s pose is perhaps an unconscious echo of Jason’s as he stalks the dragon in Turner’s earlier Liber composition (see Tate D08106; Turner Bequest CXVI E). No freehand study for the whole composition is known, the present work being an impression of Turner’s etched outline, with the tones indicated in watercolour (see technical notes below); Rawlinson did not mention this sheet in the first edition of his Liber catalogue, noting instead ‘an Etching slightly washed-in in sepia, but hardly sufficient, I think, to have been of use as a guide for mezzotinting’ in a private collection.4

Stopford Brooke thought the design ‘of all the Liber Studiorum, the most romantic, and perhaps the most beautiful. ... The scenery is that of the English woodland and river, and the figures come forth from Turner’s unschooled and childlike imagination. ... By force of their childlikeness they realize the childhood of the world.’5 In this he partly followed Ruskin, who had detected the way ‘English willows by the brooks, and English forest glades, mingle even with the heroic foliage’.6 Ruskin also used the composition as a prime example of Turner’s tree drawing: ‘Of the arrangement of the upper boughs, the Æsacus and Hesperie is perhaps the most consummate example; the absolute truth and simplicity, and the freedom from everything like fantasticism or animal form, being as marked on the one hand, as the exquisite imaginitiveness of the lines on the other.’7