This work is one of a group of more than thirty watercolour sketches in the Turner Bequest that appear to be preparatory studies for Campbell’s
Poetical Works. They are all painted on cheap, lightweight paper and executed in a rough, loose style. This sketch of a solitary, wind-blown figure looking out to sea strong resemblance to other studies in this group (see Tate
D27577; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 40 and Tate
D27559; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 42). Although the content and composition of these works cannot be directly linked to any of the finished illustrations for the series, their lonely melancholy mood may reflect Campbell’s poem ‘O’Connor’s Child’, the tragic tale of the daughter of an Irish chieftain whose lover is murdered by her brothers. In particular, the motif of a solitary figure standing on a shore recalls the following lines:
Why lingers she from Erin’s host,
So far on Galway’s shipwreck’d coast;
Why wanders she a huntress wild –
O’Connor’s pale and lovely child?
(Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell, 1837, p.68)
There is also a resemblance to another preliminary study (see Tate
D27576; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 59).
The watercolour was part of a parcel of studies described by John Ruskin as ‘A.B. 40. PO. Vignette beginnings, once on a roll. Worthless’.
1 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’.
2