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. ‘The Dead Eagle’ was inspired by a trip Campbell made to Oran in Algeria in 1836. Turner shows a group of North Africans congregating inquisitively over a dead bird, and a man on horseback pointing to the radiant sun, alluding to the sky where the eagle once soared. These elements reflect the opening verse of Campbell’s poem. Turner’s cityscape of Oran appears to have been imagined rather than based on a specific topographical precedent.