Joseph Mallord William Turner

Little can be discerned in this hastily executed study, although it may show a group of figures on a steep incline. Although the subject is too vague to be conclusively linked to any finished illustration, the work appears to be one of a group of more than thirty preparatory sketches in the Turner Bequest for Campbell’s Poetical Works. They are all painted on cheap, lightweight paper and executed in a rough, loose style.

Jan Piggott has suggested that the scene could be a preliminary study for Lord Ullin’s Daughter (National Gallery of Scotland),1 (see Tate D27580; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 63). However, there seems to be little pictorial basis for this assertion. The study has also been tentatively identified by David Blayney Brown as a preliminary sketch for A Tempest, a vignette illustration which Turner designed for Rogers’s Poems (1834) (see Tate D27719; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 202).

The work was once part of a parcel of studies described by John Ruskin as ‘A.B. 40. PO. Vignette beginnings, once on a roll. Worthless’.2 For an explanation of his meaning of ‘once on a roll’ see the technical notes above. Finberg records how Ruskin later described his phrasing in a letter to Ralph Nicholson Wornum as ‘horrible’, adding ‘I never meant it to be permanent’.3

Technical notes:
Peter Bower has noted that this study is made on off-white low-grade machine-made cartridge paper. The maker is unknown and there is no watermark. This paper would have been relatively cheap to buy and could have been purchased from a colourman, cut off from a roll to the desired size. Turner has used the ‘felt’ side of the paper which has slightly more texture than the ‘wire’ side, allowing better adhesion of pigment and graphite to the surface of the sheet. Many of Turner’s vignette studies were made on a similar grade of machine-made paper, and the artist employed the ‘felt’ side on all of them.1

Verso:

Inscribed by an unknown hand in pencil ‘AB 40 P | O’ bottom right