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

Provenance:
...; art dealer and publisher David Thomas White (operating 1834–1860), London; bought in spring 1855 by Ellen Heaton (1816–1894), Leeds, though John Ruskin, for around 55 guineas; bequeathed to her nephew Beresford Rimington Heaton (1863–1940)

This vignette depicts a scene in Greece, the slopes of Mount Parnassus and the Castalian stream with women from the village of Kastri collecting pitchers of its sacred waters for drinking or laundry. Engraved by Edward Finden (1791‒1857) in 1833, it appeared as the frontispiece to volume XIV of John Murray’s edition of The Works of Lord Byron, with his Letters and Journals, and his Life, by Thomas Moore, Esq. (Tate impression: T06652), and in part XIV of Finden’s Landscape and Portrait Illustrations to the Life and Works of Lord Byron. Murray paid £28 7 shillings for Turner’s drawing and one by William Page (1794‒1872) for Turner to use as his source, having never been to Greece himself, and £37 5 shillings and sixpence for Finden’s engraving.

The illustrations Turner supplied to Murray were designed to evoke the countries and landscapes Byron (1788‒1824) had seen and written about. They seem not to have been intended to illustrate particular passages in Byron’s poems, at least not exclusively, and were deployed somewhat arbitrarily throughout Murray’s seventeen volumes to build a cumulative impression of the Byronic world, its history, associations and current condition. As the frontispiece to volume XIV this subject was associated with lines from The Island (II, xii) describing the narrator’s rovings across time and place, North and South:

Long have I roamed through lands which are not mine,
Adored the Alps, and loved the Apennine,
Revered Parnassus...
Mixed Celtic memories with the Phrygian mount,
And Highland’s linns with Castalie’s clear fount

Turner has not attempted any such mingling, and his vignette is entirely Greek in content. He was probably more inspired by the direct tribute to Delphi and address to its ancient ‘Muse’ at the beginning of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage where Byron assures ‘thou in Hellas deemed of heavenly birth’ that he will not ‘call thee from thy sacred hill’:

Yet there I’ve wandered by thy vaunted rill,
Yes! Sighed o’er Delphi’s long deserted shrine,
Where, save that feeble fountain, all is still.

This passage and Byron’s footnote describing Kastri on the slopes of Parnassus, with its deep Pythian cave, Greek monastery and descending Castalian stream, could have contributed as much to Turner’s design as Page’s working sketch. Byron had visited the site in 1809 with his friend John Cam Hobhouse (1786‒1869), leaving his name on a column from the ancient gymnasium where the painter Charles Eastlake (1793‒1865) found it in 1818. As Jan Piggott observed, Byron habitually used Delphi and Parnassus as symbols of poetic inspiration, and ‘Parnassus’ and ‘Castalian’ loosely for ‘poetry’ in his poems and letters.1

Believed by the ancient Greeks to be the centre of the world, where Apollo killed the serpent Python as painted by Turner in Apollo and Python (1811; Tate N00488)2 and the site of the Pythian oracle and the stream or fount in which the Pythoness bathed to prepare herself for prophecy, Delphi was a place of pilgrimage in spectacular mountain scenery. Its ancient buildings largely invisible to Byron’s generation and Kastri impoverished and down-at-heel, it prompted melancholy reflections on past splendour and present decline. Travels in Sicily, Greece and Albania by Thomas Smart Hughes (London 1820), of which Turner owned a copy (private collection),3 contains a long account of Delphi’s history and scenery, such as must inspire ‘the painter who could raise his ideas to the sublime associations with which it is connected’.4 Kastri however was ‘a wretched village ... whose low mud cottages, joint tenements of man and beast, occupy the site of that gorgeous city’ and the ‘sacred stream’ was ‘miserably degraded’ by Albanian women doing their washing.5 Kastri would be abandoned altogether in 1890 and its population moved elsewhere, to allow excavations of ancient Delphi to begin in 1892.

The initial history of this work after it was engraved for John Murray is yet to be established.6 It was left to the Tate Gallery in 1940 by Beresford Rimington Heaton, a solicitor born in Leeds in 1863;7 he 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 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 this one and (apparently) Tate N05242, The Walls of Rome (another Byron subject) initially at 65 guineas each.9 After further negotiations in the spring of 1855, with Ruskin suggesting a 55 guinea price for the present subject10 to Miss Heaton, in another letter to her (likely in May), he wrote that he was ‘very glad you have the Parnassus – which is a firstrater – (Note how Turner has given the boiling up in globular fountains of the spring – how different from a common torrent. The exquisite grace of the figures is almost unique)’.11 He continued to comment in passing on the design over the next couple of years.12

In 1894 Miss Heaton ‘left her estate to her nephew’,13 and in 1940 he 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).14 Of the Turners, this one, N05242 and N05243 are Byron subjects, all acquired by Ellen Heaton at around the same time.

Verso:

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