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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > First Italian Tour 1819-20 > Albano, Nemi, Rome Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Two Sketches; a Palm Tree; and the Cloaca Maxima, Rome 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Two Sketches; a Palm Tree; and the Cloaca Maxima, Rome’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 43 Verso:
Two Sketches; a Palm Tree; and the Cloaca Maxima, Rome 1819
D15377
Turner Bequest CLXXXII 43 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 189 x 113 mm
Inscribed by the artist in pencil ‘[?River]’ right-hand edge, inverted
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The main drawing on this page is a study of a palm tree, the uppermost leaves of which continue on the opposite sheet of the double-page spread, see folio 44 (D15378). Turner has also made a small sketch of the detailed texture of the bark.
Cecilia Powell has identified the inverted sketch at the bottom of the page as the arched outlet of the Cloaca Maxima, the great Roman sewer, found near the Ponte Rotto on the eastern bank of the Tiber. Turner may have been familiar with the site from Piranesi’s engravings in Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de’Romani, 1761, but it was also widely noted by travel writers, for example Charlotte Eaton, who described it in her book, Rome in the Nineteenth Century:
Now, all that we see of it is the upper part of a grey massy arch of peperino stone, as solid as the day it was built, through which the water almost imperceptibly flows. Though choked up nearly to its top by the artificial elevation of the surface of Modern Rome, it is curious to see it still serving as the common sewer of the city, after the lapse of nearly three thousand years.1
Today the opening is enclosed within a larger arch, part of the embankment built at the end of the nineteenth century.

Nicola Moorby
May 2008

1
Charlotte Anne Waldie Eaton, Rome in the Nineteenth Century, Edinburgh 1820, p.325.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Two Sketches; a Palm Tree; and the Cloaca Maxima, Rome 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 2008, 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-two-sketches-a-palm-tree-and-the-cloaca-maxima-rome-r1132672, accessed 23 April 2024.