Joseph Mallord William Turner The Vision of Columbus, for Rogers's 'Poems' c.1830-2
Joseph Mallord William Turner,
The Vision of Columbus, for Rogers's 'Poems'
c.1830-2
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
The Vision of Columbus, for Rogers’s ‘Poems’ circa 1830–2
D27714
Turner Bequest CCLXXX 197
D27714
Turner Bequest CCLXXX 197
Pencil and watercolour, approximately 117 x 140 mm on white wove paper, 229 x 310 mm
Inscribed by ?the engraver in pencil ‘Head Piece’ top centre
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXX 197’ bottom right
Inscribed by ?the engraver in pencil ‘Head Piece’ top centre
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXX 197’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Exhibition history
1904
National Gallery, London, various dates to at least 1904 (395).
1963
Turner Watercolors from The British Museum: A Loan Exhibition Circulated by the Smithsonian Institution, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, September–October 1963, Museum of Fine Arts of Houston, Texas, November 1963, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, December 1963–January 1964, Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, January–March 1964, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, March–April 1964, Brooklyn Museum, New York, May 1964, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, June–July 1964 (49).
1974
Turner and Watercolour: An Exhibition of Watercolours Lent from the Turner Bequest at the British Museum, Arts Council tour, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry, April 1974, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, May 1974, Castle Museum, Norwich, June 1974, City Art Gallery, Leeds, June–July 1974, City Art Gallery, Bristol, July–August 1974, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, August–September 1974 (34, reproduced in colour).
1977
Turner Watercolors: An Exhibition of Works Loaned by The Trustees of the British Museum, International Exhibitions Foundation tour, Cleveland Museum of Art, September–November 1977, Detroit Institute of Arts, December 1977–February 1978, Philadelphia Museum of Art, March–April 1978 (50, reproduced).
1993
Turner’s Vignettes, Tate Gallery, London, September 1993–February 1994 (22).
1995
Sketching the Sky: Watercolours from the Turner Bequest, Tate Gallery, London, September 1995–February 1996 (no number).
2007
Hockney on Turner Watercolours, Tate Britain, London, June 2007–February 2008 (no number).
References
1903
E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), Library Edition: The Works of John Ruskin: Volume I: Early Prose Writings 1834–1843, London 1903, pp.233, 244.
1903
E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), Library Edition: The Works of John Ruskin: Volume IV: Modern Painters: Volume II, London 1903, p.299.
1904
E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), Library Edition: The Works of John Ruskin: Volume V: Modern Painters: Volume III, London 1904, p.137.
1904
E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), Library Edition: The Works of John Ruskin: Volume XIII: Turner: The Harbours of England; Catalogues and Notes, London 1904, pp.380–1.
1906
E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), Library Edition: The Works of John Ruskin: Volume XXI: The Ruskin Art Collection at Oxford, London 1906, p.214.
1909
A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings in the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.II, p.904, as ‘The Vision’.
1963
Edward Croft-Murray, Turner Watercolors from The British Museum: A Loan Exhibition Circulated by the Smithsonian Institution, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 1963, p.20 no.49.
1966
Adele Holcomb, ‘J.M.W. Turner’s Illustrations to the Poets’, unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of California, Los Angeles 1966, pp.92, 95–6.
1974
John Gage, Turner and Watercolour: An Exhibition of Watercolours Lent from the Turner Bequest at the British Museum, exhibition catalogue, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry 1974, pp.4, reproduced colour, 5, 9, 46 no.34.
1977
Andrew Wilton, Turner Watercolors: An Exhibition of Works Loaned by The Trustees of the British Museum, exhibition catalogue, Cleveland Museum of Art 1977, p.69 no.50, reproduced.
1979
Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, Fribourg 1979, pp.443–4 no.1204, reproduced, as ‘The Vision’.
1992
Jan Piggott, ‘Turner’s “Columbus” Vignettes’, Turner Society News, no.61, August 1992, p.11.
1993
Jan Piggott, Turner’s Vignettes, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1993, pp.85 no.22 reproduced, 97.
1995
Sketching the Sky: Watercolours from the Turner Bequest, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1995, p.6.
2007
David Blayney Brown, Turner Watercolours, London 2007, p.100, reproduced (colour).
This is one of seven illustrations that Turner produced for ‘The Voyage of Columbus’, a miniature epic poem which is the final work in the published volume of Rogers’s Poems (for a brief description of the poem, see Tate D27705; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 188). The seven vignettes in order of their appearance in Rogers’s text are: Tate D27705, D27706, D27714, D27707, D27708, D27719, D27709; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 188, 189, 197, 190, 191, 202, 192.
Like all of the ‘Columbus’ series, this vignette was engraved by Edward Goodall.1 The full title is A Vision. Voyage of Columbus. C.II (The Vision of Columbus) and it appears as the tail-piece to Canto II of ‘The Voyage of Columbus’.2 Whilst sailing across the vast Atlantic, Columbus and his crew are visited by ghosts from the drowned island of Atlantis:
At once the fury of the prow was quelled;
And (whence or why from many an age withheld)
Shrieks, not of men, were mingling in the blast;
And armed shapes of god-like stature passed!
Slowly along the evening-sky they went,
As on the edge of some vast battlement;
Helmet and shield, and spear and gonfalon
Streaming a baleful light that was not of the sun!
(Poems, pp.231–2)
And (whence or why from many an age withheld)
Shrieks, not of men, were mingling in the blast;
And armed shapes of god-like stature passed!
Slowly along the evening-sky they went,
As on the edge of some vast battlement;
Helmet and shield, and spear and gonfalon
Streaming a baleful light that was not of the sun!
(Poems, pp.231–2)
Turner marked the last five lines with pencil in the margin of his working copy of the 1827 edition of Poems (see Tate D36330; Turner Bequest CCCLXVI p.246). Responding directly to the text, his vignette shows a procession of ethereal armed figures silhouetted against the light of a fiery red sky. Columbus himself stands at the stern of his ship, the Santa Maria, arms outstretched in a cruciform pose, as if to ward off the warrior spirits. Like A Tempest, which appears later in the ‘Columbus’ series, The Vision is remarkable for combining imaginative design with dazzling light and colour effects (see Tate D27719; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 202). In Goodall’s engraving, the eerie luminosity of Turner’s watercolour is rendered with even greater effect due to the contrast between the brilliant white light of the sunset, the grey sky and the pitch-black form of the ship. W.G. Rawlinson described the vignette as ‘one of the finest imaginative creations by Turner or any other painter,’3 whilst Ruskin declared that The Vision, along with Turner’s oil paintings, The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in Garden of the Hesperides exhibited 1806 (Tate N00477) and Jason exhibited 1802 (Tate N00471),4 marked ‘the dawn of a new era of art, a true unison of the grotesque with the realistic power’.5
Verso:
See D40175
See D40175
Meredith Gamer
August 2006
How to cite
Meredith Gamer, ‘The Vision of Columbus, for Rogers’s ‘Poems’ c.1830–2 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 2006, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www