Joseph Mallord William Turner

This is the first of a series of historical studies, biblical and classical, running intermittently through the later pages of the sketchbook to folio 103 verso (D11036); see Introduction to the sketchbook. It is not altogether clear what the present subject might be, but perhaps we can make out a host of figures in the foreground, another in the cloud above centre and a figure of an angel to the right. If so Turner might be working towards a scene of the defeat of the rebel angels from Milton’s Paradise Lost. Alternatively, a painting, The Vision of Jacob’s Ladder (Tate N05507),1 reworked c.1830 but begun considerably earlier, might bear some general resemblance