J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Switzerland 1802 > Studies in the Louvre Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner St Roch Interceding for Victims of the Plague, after Peter Paul Rubens 1802

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘St Roch Interceding for Victims of the Plague, after Peter Paul Rubens’ 1802
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
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

How to cite

David Blayney Brown, ‘St Roch Interceding for Victims of the Plague, after Peter Paul Rubens 1802 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2005, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-st-roch-interceding-for-victims-of-the-plague-after-peter-r1129754, accessed 23 April 2024.