English: (Recto) Two views of Cape Colonna [Sounion] and the Temple of Poseidon, October 1852; (Verso) a Greek brig

No. 28 of 36 (PAI0849 - PAI0884).

(Recto) This drawing shows two views of Cape Sounion from seaward; from the east at the top and from the south at the bottom, with two Greek caiques - probably fishing boats - pencilled in on the left in the lower view. The sheet is inscribed, top left, 'Cape Colonna & / Temple of Minerva / Oct 3rd 52'.

Mends was first lieutenant of the 120-gun 'Trafalgar' in the Mediterranean when he did these studies, probably from the ship as she rounded the Cape from the east as part of a small squadron of the Mediterranean fleet en route from the Turkish coast at Urla Bay, via the Andros passage, to Piraeus as recorded in adjacent drawings in this sketchbook. He also did more distant coastal profiles of the Cape in pencil from south and east, though not necessarily at the same time (see PAD9392). As on these, he again mistakes the temple on the cape as that of Athena (Minerva), of which only foundations remain: it is in fact the 5th-century BC Temple of Poseidon, of which 18 of the original 42 columns of the peristyle still stand. Though always well known as a sea-mark, the headland and temple became part of more general European consciousness from late-18th and early 19th-century travellers' reports and gained a particular resonance from association with Lord Byron, who made two visits to it in 1810-11. He mentioned it in Canto 3 of his 'Don Juan' ('Place me on Sunium's marbled steep...') and his name can still be seen, amid other visitor graffiti, carved into the base of one of the temple columns. Though there is no firm evidence that Byron did this, his death in 1824 as a hero of the Greek War of Independence against the Turks thereafter made Sounion a place of Romantic pilgrimage as much as classical interest. Geographically it is the southern point of Attica, 43km south of Athens.

(Verso) The left half the page is a careful pencil study of a neat-looking merchant brig at anchor, seen in port bow view from a low angle. Its fore-topsail yard is lowered with the sail hanging loose over the forestay to air. It also has a cro'jack (a lower square sail on its mainmast) and is probably a Greek vessel, since it flies an ensign comprising three horizontal stripes (white between blue for Greece). It may have been drawn at or near Piraeus, since the right half of the page is part of the drawing of the plain of Athens on the next folio (PAI0877) of which the verso also bears a drawing of Salamis, both done on 8 October 1852.

Two views of Cape Colonna [Sounion] and the Temple of Poseidon