This is one of a group of oil sketches on millboard found in the 1950s in a brown paper parcel among the Turner Bequest drawings at the British Museum. Two are distinct in style and the thickness of the millboard used, but the others form a fairly consistent group, though their sizes vary. In so far as they can be dated by stylistic criteria the majority would seem to have been painted in the 1830s or even the 1840s (see Nos.498-500). This example, however, is so close in composition and colouring to some of the sketches thought to have been painted while Turner was in Rome in 1828 (see Nos. 475-80) that it is grouped with them.