This unfinished study appears to show an airborne form and a procession of figures set against a background of dark waters and feathery clouds. Although the subject is too vague to be conclusively linked to any of Turner’s finished vignette illustrations, the work may be one of a group of more than thirty watercolour studies in the Turner Bequest that appear to be preparatory sketches 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 vignette could be a preparatory sketch for
The Last Man circa 1835 (National Gallery of Scotland),
1 an illustration which Turner produced for Edward Moxon’s 1837 edition of
Thomas Campbell’s Poetical Works.
2 However, the study shares the same palette and painting style as a work that has been tentatively identified by David Blayney Brown as a preliminary study for
A Tempest, one of Turner’s designs for Rogers’s
Poems (1834) (see Tate
D27583; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 66). In light of these similarities, it seems possible that the study seen here is also related to Rogers’s
Poems; in particular, it may be an experimental composition for Turner’s illustration
The Landing of Columbus (see
D27708; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 191).
The work once was part of a parcel of studies described by John Ruskin as ‘A.B. 40. PO. Vignette beginnings, once on a roll. Worthless’.
3 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’.
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