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