Joseph Mallord William Turner

Engraved:
Etching, aquatint and mezzotint by Turner and F.C. Lewis, untitled, published Turner, 23 April 1812

The present design is considered to have been one of the earliest made for the Liber Studiorum, given its tentative appearance, and derivative style and subject1 based on Richard Earlom’s prints after Claude’s Liber Veritatis drawings, which have been cited as the immediate inspiration for Turner’s own series (see general Liber introduction). The composition (albeit when engraved in reverse) has affinities with several of Liber Veritatis prints including nos.3 (Landscape with Brigands),2 7 (Pastoral Landscape),3 20 (Pastoral Landscape)4 and 34 (Landscape with Brigands ...).5

Consequently, it was dismissed by Ruskin as one of the Liber designs ‘modified by forced imitation of Claude ... All the worst and feeblest studies in the book ... owe the principal part of their imbecilities to Claude’.6 Stopford Brooke perceived an uneasiness in Turner’s combination of Claude and Nature, as he did in other compositions in Turner’s ‘EP’ category (likely to indicate ‘Elevated Pastoral’ – see general Liber introduction). After a lengthy passage praising the evocation of great distances in the composition, he declared: ‘This is the kind of thing Claude could not do, and the plate was done in rivalry with Claude. ... But it is just because it is work done in rivalry, and in the manner of his rival, that it is not successful rivalry. The imitation takes away some of Turner’s individuality’.7 He concluded it was ‘[h]alf nature then, half convention; half Turner, half pseudo-Claude’ and thus ‘disagreeable’.8

As outlined below, in the first edition of his Liber catalogue, Rawlinson had used letters from Turner and the aquatint specialist F.C. Lewis in relation to the composition to demonstrate that it had been the first to be engraved, in 1807 – although it was not published until 1812, when the series was well under way – and later refuted at length C.F. Bell’s published doubts on the issue.9 Finberg also cast doubt on Rawlinson’s claims, since Turner’s only dated letter to Lewis regarding the print post-dated the first published part of the Liber (with mezzotints by Charles Turner) by some months;10 however, as Gillian Forrester notes in her review of the evidence, this does not preclude the possibility that the plate had been in hand for some time, and that Rawlinson’s interpretation may well be correct.11