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

This vignette, Ship-building (An Old Oak Dead), was published in the 1834 edition of Rogers’s Poems and appears as the tail-piece to a poem entitled, To an Old Oak.1 It is a pair with another illustration, An Old Oak, which appears as the head-piece to the same poem (see Tate D27691; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 174). Both prints were engraved by Edward Goodall.2 The poem describes the life of an old oak tree and Turner’s illustrations correspondingly show the tree in life and in death. The first vignette accompanying Rogers’s verse shows the tree at the centre of English village life. This scene, however, shows the trunk of the oak felled and stripped and carted off to a naval dockyard:

Turner marked this stanza with pencil in the margin of his own copy of the 1827 edition of Poems (see Tate D36330; Turner Bequest CCCLXVI p.188). As Adele Holcomb has noted, a small thumbnail sketch on the opposite page shows the skeletal branches of a tree devoid of leaves (Tate D36330; Turner Bequest CCCLXVI p.189).3 This seems to suggest that the artist was originally planning to illustrate the final verse:

Ultimately however, he opted for a more positive angle, depicting the frame of a large ship under construction from the wood supplied by the old oak. The tree’s death is not in vain, for it is soon to begin a proud new life as part of the timbers of a vessel in the British navy:

Judy Egerton has suggested that the buildings beyond may depict the naval dockyard at Chatham.4

Despite the somber tone of Rogers’s poem, Turner here shows a bright and light-hearted scene filled with activity. A spirit of patriotism is introduced by the proud standard of the Royal Navy flying about the skeleton of the ship. As Egerton has discussed, oak trees were a symbol of enduring strength and became a metaphor for the nation’s naval defences. Mordechai Omer has noted a line of Turner’s own poetry which described the ‘stubborn British oak’ from which the ‘mighty frame’ of ships was formed, and in which great honour was achieved: ‘Some dare the restless billows to provoke | And float secure to fame in British Oak’ (see the Perspective sketchbook, Tate D07388–9; Turner Bequest CVIII 20–1).5 English ships were traditionally built of oak, although by the nineteenth century a shortage of the trees meant that other materials such as iron and Indian teak were more commonly substituted.6 A popular song, ‘Hearts of Oak’, originally written by David Garrick, had been adopted as the unofficial anthem of the Navy. An additional reference for both Rogers and Turner may have been the poetry of James Thomson (1700–48).7 In the poem ‘Autumn’, part of his famous epic The Seasons, Thomson describes a British warship:

Turner greatly admired Thomson and owned a copy of Dr Anderson’s Works of the British Poets with Prefaces Biographical and Critical (1795) which contained the poet’s complete works.

Verso:
See D41513