Archway with Trees by the Sea; Sketch for ‘The Parting of Hero and Leander’

In October 1828 Turner reached Rome for his second long stay in Italy, and this sketch is usually thought to belong to that winter, though Tate allows that he may have begun it earlier. It is painted on coarse canvas, probably Italian, that came off a roll. For each new composition Turner tacked a stretch of the roll to a small support and painted straight over the tacks. Their holes still show along the top and bottom edges, and the fine vertical cracks across the surface come from the canvas being rolled. These were trials of layout in the manner of Claude Lorrain, the 17th-century painter of idealised landscapes and harbours, broad masses of light and dark with almost no detail. Turner kept this one, with its arch, its dark pair of trees and its open sea, for years. It became the setting of The Parting of Hero and Leander, which he showed at the Royal Academy in 1837.