'St Roch Interceding for Victims of the Plague, after Peter Paul Rubens', Joseph Mallord William Turner

Artwork details

Artist

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775‑1851)

Title

St Roch Interceding for Victims of the Plague, after Peter Paul Rubens

From Studies in the Louvre Sketchbook

Turner Bequest LXXII

Date 1802

MediumGraphite on paper

Dimensionssupport: 128 x 114 mm

Collection

Tate

Acquisition Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

Reference

D04345

Turner Bequest LXXII 55

View this artwork by appointment, at Tate Britain's Prints and Drawings Rooms

Turner's sketchbooks

View this artwork in the Studies in the Louvre Sketchbook

Catalogue entry

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851

Folio 55 Recto:

St Roch Interceding for Victims of the Plague, after Peter Paul Rubens 1802

D04345
Turner Bequest LXXII 55

Pencil, red and blue washes, with some scratching out, on white wove paper prepared with a reddish grey wash, 128 x 114 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘55’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘LXXII–55’ bottom right

Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

References

As first observed by Ziff, this is a partial copy of Rubens’s (Peter Paul Rubens, 1577–1640) altarpiece, dated 1632, taken from the cathedral church of St Martin in Alost, Belgium, and returned after 1815. It reproduces only the central lower half of the composition, where plague sufferers writhe and plead before an arched bridge. Rubens was an artist who grew on Turner, as he did on the Romantic generation in general. Turner was primarily interested in his landscape effects, which he found impressive if inclined to be meretricious; see his notes on Rubens’s Landscape with a Tournament and Landscape with a Rainbow, folios 77 verso and 79 of this sketchbook (D04375, D04376).

Verso:

Blank

David Blayney Brown
July 2005

Read this catalogue entry in full

This catalogue entry is part of: David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, December 2012.