J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

Lord Byron (1788‒1824) set scenes in his verse drama The Deformed Transformed beside the walls of Rome. Accordingly this vignette, engraved by Edward Finden (1791‒1857), appeared in January 1833 on the title page of volume XIII of The Works of Lord Byron, with his Letters and Journals, and his Life, by Thomas Moore, Esq. containing the play (Tate impression: T06651). It was also included in Finden’s Landscape and Portrait Illustrations to the Life and Works of Lord Byron, in part XIII. The publisher John Murray’s accounts cite £31 10 shillings for the watercolour and a working sketch, and £54 for the engraving.

Instead of the sixteenth-century siege of Rome envisioned in Part II of Byron’s play, Turner’s vignette is a graveyard scene in the Protestant (now the non-Catholic) cemetery beneath the city walls, with the pyramidal tomb of Cestius and the Porta San Paolo. Mourners beside a freshly dug grave and a modest wood coffin provide a poignant modern counterpoint to the grandiose ancient tomb. It is evening, doubly lit by setting sun and rising moon, an effect loved by Byron and adopted by Turner in many of his Byronic subjects. Rather than prompted by Byron’s stage directions, Turner’s reflections on transience and the passage of time seem to echo those of Bourbon in the previous scene of the play, on the ‘past earth and present phantom of Imperial Rome’ and the ghosts that ‘flit along the eternal city’s rampart | And stretch their glorious, gory, shadowy hands | And beckon me away’. Nevertheless, Jan Piggott found these connections tenuous beside the ‘eloquent meditations on the fragile world and the fall of civilisation’ in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.1

The tomb of the still-mysterious Cestius probably dates from between 18 and 12 BC and reflects the Egyptomania current in Rome after Egypt became subsumed into its empire. Byron did not mention the pyramid in his play and in Childe Harold referred instead to the tower containing the tomb of Cecilia Metella near another section of the walls. He and his friend John Cam Hobhouse (1786‒1869) knew both these monuments from their rides around the Roman walls in 1810 and in his prose Historical Illustrations to the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold (London 1818) Hobhouse dryly observed that ‘Cestius is as little famous as Metella, and his pyramid is no less conspicuous than her tower. Oblivion, however, has been kind perhaps to one who has left no other present to posterity than this ambitious sepulchre.’2

The initial history of this work after it was engraved for John Murray is yet to be established.3 It was left to the Tate Gallery in 1940 by Beresford Rimington Heaton, a solicitor born in Leeds in 1863.4 In Andrew Wilton’s standard catalogue of Turner’s watercolours, he noted one intervening transaction: ‘H.A.J. Munro of Novar, sale 6 April 1878 (77), bt. Makins’.5 Turner’s friend and patron Munro (1797‒1864) had built up a collection of around 130 drawings by Turner included ‘illustrations to the poets’.6 The Wilton entry concurs with the relevant entry in a posthumous Christie’s sale catalogue: ‘The Walls of Rome: Tomb of Caius Sextus [sic]. Engraved in Finden’s illustrations to Lord Byron’s Works | 5 ½ x 8 ½ in[ches]’.7 If reliable, these dimensions equate to 140 x 216 mm, varying somewhat from the 146 x 197 mm given here for this sheet.

However, this conflicts with another well-documented narrative. B.R. Heaton was the nephew of Ellen Heaton (1816–1894), a patron of the Pre-Raphaelites and friend of the writer John Ruskin, Turner’s patron and critical champion. In Virginia Surtees’s study of Miss Heaton’s association and correspondence with Ruskin, there are extensive apparent references to the present work. Ruskin was evidently closely involved in her acquiring it from the London dealer David Thomas White.8 On 3 February 1855 Ruskin wrote to Miss Heaton to advise her of five Turner vignettes available from White, including a ‘Walls of Rome’ subject along with ‘Mount Parnassus’, evidently Tate N05238, Parnassus and Castalian Spring (Delphi) (another Byron subject), initially at 65 guineas each.9 Ruskin wrote again on 9 February:

Meanwhile, the price had been dropped to £52 10 shillings.12 Ruskin continued to comment approvingly in passing on the ‘Walls’ design over the years, often also as ‘Caius Cestius’, with a last reference on or about 1 May 1864,13 around six months before H.A.J. Munro’s death.

Assuming that the present sheet is the one so admired by Ruskin and acquired in 1855, it seems unlikely that Ellen Heaton would have sold it to Munro in the last year of his life before repurchasing it at a much higher price in or after 1878. Perhaps the Christie’s catalogue of that year is mistaken in identifying Munro’s work as the engraved ‘Walls of Rome’ design, or (less likely) it might have been another version or variant, otherwise unrecorded. At any event, in 1894 Miss Heaton ‘left her estate to her nephew’,14 and in 1940 B.R. Heaton bequeathed eight Turner watercolours to the Tate Gallery (Tate N05236–N05243), along with works by D.G. Rossetti and Arthur Hughes (N05228–N05235, N05244–N05245).15 Of the Turners, this one, N05238 and N05243 are Byron subjects.

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