Sketch for ‘Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus’

Turner blocked this out on canvas around 1827, before setting off for his second long stay in Rome. The pictures he painted in Italy were held up in transit on the way home, so he had to find new work in a hurry for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1829, and the finished Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus was one of the canvases he produced for it. The subject is the moment in Homer when Odysseus, safely aboard his ship, shouts his own name back at the cyclops he has blinded. The colour startled people. One London critic called it a specimen of colouring run mad, and the piercing yellow they objected to went on to dominate his late work. The finished painting is in the National Gallery. This canvas stayed in the studio.