Jessica (nach William Shakespeares Der Kaufmann von Venedig, II. Akt, 5. Szene)

Turner painted this in Rome in 1828, during a long winter stay, and shipped it home with the rest of that season's canvases. When it reached the Royal Academy in 1830 it was mauled. The subject is Jessica, Shylock's daughter, at a window in Venice, drawn from one line of The Merchant of Venice in which her father tells her to shut the casements. Reviewers went for the yellow, and the joke that stuck was that she looked like a woman climbing out of a mustard pot. Turner's first biographer, writing in 1862, said that none but a great man dare have painted anything so bad. George Wyndham, third Earl of Egremont, bought it from him anyway, around 1831, and it hangs at Petworth, in the house where Egremont had given Turner a room to paint in.