From Walter Fawkes's collection. Turner is known to have been engaged on a pair of views of ‘Vesuvius In Repose' and 'In Eruption' for W. B. Cooke in about 1817 and it has been supposed that this drawing is one of them. It is said to have been engraved by Cooke for Delineations of Pompeii. But it seems more likely that Cooke's drawings were the two in the John Dillon sale, Christie 17 April 1869 (36 and 37), both bought by Ruskin. It is possible that one of them was the subject engraved by Thomas Jeavons in 1830 for Friendship's Offering (Rawlinson 339). A small watercolour 67 x 11 1/8 in which is radically different in design from the present drawing, of Vesuvius with shipping in the foreground, is now in a private collection in London and is probably the companion; it corresponds exactly with the subject reproduced in Ruskin's Lectures on Landscape, 1897 fp. 16. If this identification is correct, the Dillon/Ruskin pair were much smaller than the single Fawkes 'Vesuvius'.

Turner was working on several views of Italy from drawings by J. Hakewill published in 1818-20, and Hakewill may have supplied him with sketches on which these scenes were based, although no view of Vesuvius appears in Hakewill's Picturesque Tour of Italy. The format, with the bay sweeping in a curve to the left, suggests a reminiscence of J. R. Cozens. As a work showing Turner's interest in Italy before he went there, it may be placed with the large 'Composition of Tivoli' also of 1817 (No.181).