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

This is a variant of the composition set out in pencil and ink and wash versions on folios 3 verso and 4 of the sketchbook (D06184, D06185) and, as Hill observes, the closest to Turner’s watercolour Chryses (private collection) exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1811.1 It does, however, lack the figure of the priest Chryses himself. See especially note to 3 verso for the subject from Homer’s Iliad and folio 5 (D06186) for its likely relationship to others in the book including Ulysses and Polyphemus, drawn on the other side of the present leaf. Finberg’s suggestion that the subject here is Glaucus and Scylla must have originated from John Ruskin’s remarks in his endorsement for the sketchbook (see Introduction and below), and from the similarity of the composition to that subject in Turner’s Liber Studiorum (see especially Tate D08170; Turner Bequest CXVIII P). The setting of a bay with arched rocks is common to both Chryses and Glaucus and Scylla and shared the same sources including pictures by Claude Lorrain; for further comment see notes to the Studies for Pictures: Isleworth sketchbook (Tate D05588; Turner Bequest XC 61a).2 Turner used a different arrangement of arched rocks for Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus – Homer’s Odyssey (National Gallery, London),3 exhibited in 1829.

The wash marks on this leaf have spread across the gutter of the book from another facing page, but apparently not from folio 6 (D06188), suggesting that the contents have been rearranged or a leaf has been removed. Ruskin’s comment in his endorsement, noting ‘Glaucus & Scylla on the back of Polyphemus study [that is, the recto, D06186], which is cut out for Marlb.[orough] H[ouse]’, must be evidence of this. However, there is no record of the recto being exhibited separately.