Joseph Mallord William Turner

This is one of seven illustrations that Turner produced for ‘The Voyage of Columbus’, a miniature epic poem which is the final work in the published volume of Rogers’s Poems (for a brief description of the poem, see Tate D27705; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 188). The seven vignettes in order of their appearance in Rogers’s text are: Tate D27705, D27706, D27714, D27707, D27708, D27719, D27709; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 188, 189, 197, 190, 191, 202, 192.

Like all of the ‘Columbus’ series, this vignette was engraved by Edward Goodall.1 The full title is A Vision. Voyage of Columbus. C.II (The Vision of Columbus) and it appears as the tail-piece to Canto II of ‘The Voyage of Columbus’.2 Whilst sailing across the vast Atlantic, Columbus and his crew are visited by ghosts from the drowned island of Atlantis:

Turner marked the last five lines with pencil in the margin of his working copy of the 1827 edition of Poems (see Tate D36330; Turner Bequest CCCLXVI p.246). Responding directly to the text, his vignette shows a procession of ethereal armed figures silhouetted against the light of a fiery red sky. Columbus himself stands at the stern of his ship, the Santa Maria, arms outstretched in a cruciform pose, as if to ward off the warrior spirits. Like A Tempest, which appears later in the ‘Columbus’ series, The Vision is remarkable for combining imaginative design with dazzling light and colour effects (see Tate D27719; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 202). In Goodall’s engraving, the eerie luminosity of Turner’s watercolour is rendered with even greater effect due to the contrast between the brilliant white light of the sunset, the grey sky and the pitch-black form of the ship. W.G. Rawlinson described the vignette as ‘one of the finest imaginative creations by Turner or any other painter,’3 whilst Ruskin declared that The Vision, along with Turner’s oil paintings, The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in Garden of the Hesperides exhibited 1806 (Tate N00477) and Jason exhibited 1802 (Tate N00471),4 marked ‘the dawn of a new era of art, a true unison of the grotesque with the realistic power’.5