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

Finberg, Butlin and Joll and Hill note the similarity of this composition, of a classical landscape with a procession passing through an arch and crossing a bridge on the left, to Mercury and Herse exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1811 (on the London art market in 2005).1 More elaborate, worked up with brown wash and treated on landscape format, this study may have evolved from the upright versions in pen outline in the contemporary Studies for Pictures: Isleworth sketchbook (beginning on folio 57, Tate D05581; Turner Bequest XC 57).2 The right portion of the present leaf has been torn off, and if this was done by Turner himself it would show him reverting to the idea of an upright composition, as indeed he adopted for the picture. Alternatively, if the subject-matter was undecided at this stage, he may have wanted to consider the remaining part of the design in relation to the study on the following leaf (D05774) which he used for another historic landscape, Dido and Aeneas exhibited at the Academy in 1814 but probably painted earlier (Tate N00494).3 Overlapping folio 5, the remaining portion of folio 4 provides an alternative treatment of the left half of the composition.