Joseph Mallord William Turner

Engraved:
(see main catalogue text)

As Nicola Moorby sets out in her catalogue entries for the 1819 Naples, Paestum and Rome sketchbook (Tate; Turner Bequest CLXXXVI), Paestum (Pesto in modern Italian) was the most southerly site Turner visited on his Italian tour of 1819–20, on the Tyrrhenian coast about twenty miles south-east of Salerno, where three Doric Greek temples dating from the fifth century BC stand on the plain. Turner had shown one of them, taken from an existing source, in a watercolour diagrams for his 1811 Royal Academy perspective lectures (Tate D17072; Turner Bequest CXCV 102). He made various sketches at Paestum in 1819 (Tate D15945, D15946, D15968–D15973, D15995–D15997; Turner Bequest CLXXXVI 19a, 19b, 29–31a, 42a–43a). Luke Herrmann has suggested that Turner worked on the ‘Little Liber’ design soon after his return from Italy, dating the inception of the whole series rather earlier than is generally suggested.1

The temples were also the subject of a watercolour vignette of about 1826–7 (Tate D27665 CCLXXX 148),2 engraved for Samuel Rogers’s Italy (1830), again including storm clouds and lightning above a low horizon.3 However, both it and the ‘Little Liber’ design are by no means accurate transcriptions of the sketches; rather, as Cecilia Powell has observed, they imaginatively reflect ‘the theme of vast temples standing firm amid wind and storm’.4 Andrew Wilton relates John Ruskin’s idea of Turner’s association of lightning with ‘monuments of dead religion’;5 the general composition and mood have been appropriately compared with the late unpublished Liber Studiorum composition Stonehenge of about 1824 (preliminary watercolour in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).6

The present composition was engraved in mezzotint,7 traditionally ascribed to Turner himself, although the plate was apparently not one of those found in his studio after his death8 (see the ‘Little Liber’ introduction). The development of the design through four trial proof stages is described by Rawlinson and Dupret, who mention the present watercolour as the source,9 as had Ruskin as early as 1878.10 At first the print only included the temple on the left, to which a second temple in the central distance and a buffalo skeleton in the foreground were added. Tate’s impression (T04914) is from the late nineteenth century, with signs of corrosion suggesting that the plate was of steel rather than copper.11