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

This rough watercolour and pencil sketch is a preliminary study for the vignette The Forum, which Turner produced for Rogers’s Italy (see Tate D27675; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 158). It shows a seated suppliant figure and a monk beneath an archway. This is a motif that also appears in Turner’s large-scale canvas Forum Romanum (Tate N00504), which he painted shortly before beginning work on his Italy commission.1

Beyond the archway, Turner has drawn a triumphant arch in pencil, an addition that is perhaps intended to locate the scene in or near Rome. In the final version of The Forum, Turner retained the archway as a framing device but dramatically altered the vignette’s content by eliminating the foreground figures and filling the space beyond the arch with a view into the Roman Forum. Turner produced a second preliminary study for The Forum, in which a frieze-like funeral procession passes before a columned Roman structure (see Tate D27621; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 104).

The study was part of a bundle labelled by John Ruskin on the wrapper as ‘Studies for Italy. Coarse, but noble’.2 Finberg records how Ruskin later described his phrasing in a letter to Ralph Nicholson Wornum as ‘horrible’, adding ‘I never meant it to be permanent’.3

Verso:

Inscribed by unknown hands in pencil ‘128 a’ centre right and ‘AB 83 P’ and ‘R’ and ‘CCLXXX 103’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXX 103’ bottom left