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

With the page turned horizontally, this is a distant view of seven sailing vessels in a horizontal line.

The sketch is one of a series of rapid studies of sailing vessels that Turner completed when he visited Portsmouth ‘to witness the naval review, ... unprecedented in his lifetime’, as Eric Shanes has described it,1 which was the culmination of the Allied Sovereign’s visit to England, on Friday 24 June 1814. From this series of studies, Turner may have ‘entertained the notion of producing a large painting of the Allied sovereigns and the Prince Regent undertaking their duties, but if so nothing would come of it.’2 As discussed in the Introduction, the sequence of largely slight sketches of the occasion occupies most of the rest of the sketchbook. See also folios 24 recto, 26–36 and 40 (Tate D10010, D10014–D10024, D10029; CXXXVI 24, 26–36, 40) and beyond.

The recto (D10009) shows Drake’s Island in Plymouth Sound, concluding a sequence of views there and along the Tamar Valley between Devon and Cornwall. There is thus a chance that the shipping seen here was moored off Plymouth, but the landmark on folio 24 verso (D10012) establishes that the Portsmouth sequence was at least under way by that point.