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

This is a preliminary study for the vignette illustration The Garden, which was engraved by William Miller and published as the frontispiece for the 1834 edition of Rogers’s Poems (see Tate D27679; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 162). The final composition shows an Italian garden occupied by an elderly man and a young boy. Some elements from the finished design also appear here, including several groups of trees, the outline figure of an old man, and a three columned structure drawn in pencil. As Jan Piggott has observed, this study is clearly linked in palette and style to another preparatory study that Turner produced for Rogers’s Poems, Study for ‘An Old Oak’ (see Tate D27533; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 16).1

Verso:

Inscribed by unknown hands in pencil ‘AB 117 P| M’ and ‘CCLXIII 17’ bottom right