Joseph Mallord William Turner

Historical Study: For ‘The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides’ or ‘Apollo and Python’

1802–11

Image released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

License this image

In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

View by appointment
Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
Rhine, Strassburg and Oxford Sketchbook
Medium
Graphite on paper
Dimensions
Support: 154 × 240 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D04789
Turner Bequest LXXVII 45

Catalogue entry

See note to folio 43 verso of this sketchbook (D04787) for John Ruskin’s note labelling a parcel containing this drawing as studies of Apollo and Python. Discounting this, Finberg associated it with The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides exhibited at the British Institution in 1806 (Tate N00477).1 See folio 44 (D04788) for the picture and for another possibly related sketch. Kathleen Nicholson, however, regards the present sketch as closer to Apollo and Python exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1811 (Tate N00488),2 to which folio 43 verso relates, and ‘perhaps even its first draft’.3
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
Ibid., p.82 no.115 (pl.119).
3
Nicholson 1990, p.73 note 26.
Verso:
Inscribed by an unknown hand in black ink ‘192 (within circle) bottom right
Inscribed by an unknown hand in pencil ‘LXXVII’ right of centre

David Blayney Brown
March 2004

Read full Catalogue entry

Explore

You might like

Left Right

In the shop

Browse the shop