About this artwork

The Scottish National Gallery has the only set of Turner’s literary vignettes that remain together in one collection, his twenty illustrations for ‘The Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell’ . These were made to be engraved in Edward Moxon’s edition of Campbell’s poems, published in 1837. A copy of this book is in the collection of the Scottish National Gallery Print Room. The soldier is shown in the upper half of the vignette, leaning on his musket among his slumbering comrades, beneath a crescent moon. As he sleeps, the soldier dreams of ‘the pleasant fields’ of his homeland and of his wife and children, pictured below. Around him on the battlefield cannons and fires can be seen; below Turner depicts his homecoming.

Updated before 2020

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Joseph Mallord William Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner