Exh. RA 1832
Oil on canvas

‘. . . and now, fair Italy!
Thou art the garden of the world.
Even in thy desert what is like to thee?
Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy waste
More rich than other climes’ fertility:
Thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin graced
With an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced.’
(Lord Byron, Childe Harold, Canto IV)

Published in four cantos between 1812 and 1818, Lord Byron’s poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage describes the travels, experiences and meditations of a self-exiled pilgrim named Harold (‘Childe’ is an archaic title applied to a young noble awaiting knighthood), whose wanderings correspond in many ways to Byron’s own, though the poet denied that he identified with Harold. Nevertheless, after following the main character on his travels through continental Europe, Byron abandoned the device of the wanderer in Canto IV to speak directly, in a long meditation, on many aspects of Italy.

Turner was particularly attracted to Childe Harold, as it seemed to embody so many of his own impressions of travel and the places that he had visited. During the ensuing years he exhibited six pictures with quotations taken from the poem (see nos.46). Here, Turner did not illustrate a specific description in Canto IV, painting instead an idealised view of Italy itself. His sweeping panorama is a composite image of many areas he had seen and sketched during his two tours of the country, including the Tiber, the Campagna, the bridges of Narni, the Temple of Clitumnus and the celebrated vistas at Tivoli. He had drawn on similar distillations of vivid impressions for some of the small vignette illustrations that he produced for the celebrated 1830 edition of Samuel Rogers’s poem Italy (1830), which were among the most widely successful of his works, reaching thousands of armchair travellers, including the young John Ruskin.