Ploughing, Eton

Provenance:
...
? Thomas Lupton
...
Henry Vaughan by 1878

Engraved:
(see main catalogue entry)

While the initial pencil and wash study for this unpublished Liber Studiorum composition shows a cathedral-like building probably based on York Minster (Studies for Liber sketchbook, Tate D08100; Turner Bequest CXV 47), Turner modified the composition when he came to etch the outline, to show the more compact profile of Eton College Chapel. As Gillian Forrester suggests, he may have referred back to slight studies in the Windsor, Eton sketchbook, both for the chapel (Tate D06075, D06076; Turner Bequest XCVII 4, 5) and the plough (D06161; XCVII 81a).

Forrester also notes that Turner may have begun working on this agricultural subject for the Liber after the 1813 publication of an etching after his watercolour of the mid-1790s, Autumn – Sowing Grain (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven),1 in John Hassell’s drawing manual Aqua Pictura.2 In turn this may have reminded him of its companion watercolour, Ploughing (Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino),3 which includes the back view of a ploughboy holding a whip, as etched by Turner in the present work.4 The patriotic connotations of ploughing, and the implications of peaceful bucolic activities emphasised by the presence of a woman and child, may perhaps be related to the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, at about the time the design was first conceived.5 Turner often depicted sites in the Thames Valley in idyllic, idealised form,6 with a ‘juxtaposition of elevated architecture and humble agricultural toil.’7

Turner first drew the subject with the woman and child on the right and the ploughman approaching from the left (Tate D08100; Turner Bequest CXV 47). When he came to etch the composition, he copied the orientation of the figures directly from the drawing, such that they were reversed in the various subsequent prints. The printing history of the design and the various changes made to the figures and landscape at each stage are complex, and not clarified by the various proofs or states being numbered differently in the two editions of Rawlinson’s Liber catalogue and recorded under a different system by Finberg.8