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Astronomy: a woman walking on a hillside near below Brightling Observatory, East Sussex. Engraving by W.B. Cooke, 1819, after J.M.W. Turner. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark. Source: Wellcome Collection.
A woman holding a scroll of paper asks for directions from a man holding a basket. Cattle graze on the lower slopes, sheep on the upper slopes. At the top of the hill is the new astronomical observatory built in 1810-1818 by John (Jack) Fuller M.P. (the landowner) to the design of Sir Robert Smirke
"Mr. Thornbury, the biographer of Turner, says: 'I go to few places in England but I seem to meet Turner. I find him on the Derbyshire Hills, and among the ruins of Yorkshire abbeys. I meet his ghost on the banks of the Wharfe, and on the seashore at Dover. I come across him in the green hop-fields of Kent, and in the marshes of the Thames. I see his short, stalwart spirit pacing about the Scotch moors, and around the pebbly marshes of Scotch lakes. I never go on the Thames, and look at St. Paul's, but I seem to see him bout past me, and steer on to that old loved Chelsea. In Wales, at Oxford, in Sussex, in Wiltshire, I still cannot drive away the remembrance of him. He haunts Fonthill, Petworth, and Tabley; he meets one at every old castle and abbey in England; he has been on every river, and in every county. He did much to spread the fame of the beauty of our country. No painter ever did so much: the number of engravings executed from his sketches of scenery in Great Britain amounts to several hundreds, and a very large portion of them belong to a comparatively early period of his career. Turner’s drawings have elicited as much praise from his admirers as the noblest of his oil paintings. One has but to look at the female figure forming so conspicuous an object in the foreground of the accompanying engraving of 'Brightling Observatory' to be convinced that the drawing from which it was taken must have been made very many years ago; for certainly her dress is of a type to which the living generation, except those of us who may be getting into the sear and yellow leaf, knows nothing except in pictures. The view itself has, in all probability, undergone great changes since Turner sketched it, and, we believe, the Observatory no longer exists ; the hill on which it stood rises to a height of 646 feet above the level of the sea. Brightling is a small village about three or four miles north of Battle, a locality which has beauties almost peculiar to itself, and Turner was always on the search after variety in the picturesque. Here we have a wide sweep of downs, with their rich covering of short and delicate turf, fragrant with wild thyme, whereon large flocks of sheep feed—the celebrated 'South-Downs,' whose flesh is esteemed a delicacy even on the table of the epicure. The scene is finely broken into hill and dale, with noble patches of forest trees here and there to relieve the eye of all monotony both of form and surface, and permitting the artist to display his powers of regulating the light and shade of his picture in the most effective manner. Turner's management of chiar-oscuro is always notable, and he often made it depend less upon the composition itself—that is, upon the objects or materials of which it was made up—than of those which did not appear in it. The chief, and indeed almost the only way of doing this, is by invoking the aid of clouds, and causing those which are out of the picture to throw their reflections on certain portions of the landscape. Almost the whole of the foreground in the drawing of 'Brightling Observatory' is treated in this manner; there is no other way in which the long line of shadow passing across the composition, and gradually merging into the light on the left can be accounted for; and how effective is the result!"--The art journal, loc. cit.