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. Here, Turner shows a fashionable young couple in eighteenth-century clothing carving their names into the tree’s bark; the inscription they have made is a reference to the subject of D 5167. They have discarded a hat, shawl and parasol. In the foreground are the woodsman’s tools, and at the left a dog. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin is said to have particularly admired Turner’s depiction of the tree.

Updated before 2020

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  • artist:
  • title:
    One of Twenty Vignettes - The Beech Tree's Petition
  • date created:
    About 1835
  • materials:
    Watercolour over pencil on paper
  • measurements:
    13.50 x 11.00 cm (framed: 45.60 x 40.00 cm)
  • object type:
  • credit line:
    Accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to the National Gallery of Scotland, 1988
  • accession number:
    D 5168
  • gallery:
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Joseph Mallord William Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner