Joseph Mallord William Turner

This sketch of sailing vessels in the Bay of Naples must have been taken from a boat off the coast. The horizon is dominated by the unmistakeable silhouette of the cone of Vesuvius. The boat on the left-hand side of the view is a felucca, a wooden sailing craft with a lateen or triangular sail which were a common sight in the Italian seas. Gillian Forrester has suggested that sketches like these may have informed the inspiration and composition for a later unpublished design for the Liber Studiorum, The Felucca (see Tate D08175; Turner Bequest CXVIII U).1 However, the scene is more reminiscent of Turner’s watercolour vignette illustration, Bay of Naples for Rogers’s Italy (see Tate D27660; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 143).