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 > Gandolfo to Naples Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Mole Lighthouse, Naples; and a View of Castel dell'Ovo and Pizzofalcone from the West 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Mole Lighthouse, Naples; and a View of Castel dell'Ovo and Pizzofalcone from the West’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 36 Recto:
The Mole Lighthouse, Naples; and a View of Castel dell’Ovo and Pizzofalcone from the West 1819
D15625
Turner Bequest CLXXXIV 35
Pencil on white wove paper, 122 x 197 mm
Inscribed by ?John Ruskin in blue ink ‘281’ bottom right and ‘35’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CLXXXIV 35’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The two drawings on this page represent variant views of Naples.1 The main study in the bottom left-hand corner is a view of the lighthouse which stood on the former Mole (pier) facing the old port or arsenale (naval shipyard) near Castel Nuovo.2 It was a landmark much favoured by artists visiting Naples and appears in countless paintings from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, usually looking east out to sea, with Vesuvius and the Sorrentine peninsula in the background.3 Turner’s sketch, however, offers a more unusual and somewhat confusing viewpoint looking with the lighthouse on the elbow of the pier to the left, back towards the buildings lining the waterfront. On the right-hand side he has faintly indicated a ship with a tall mast docked alongside the jetty. For a depiction of the lighthouse looking from the opposite direction see folio 70 (D15672; Turner Bequest CLXXXIV 58), and for a similar view see a sketch from the sea in the Naples, Paestum, Rome sketchbook (Tate D15914; Turner Bequest CLXXXVI 4).
The sketch in the top right-hand corner depicts a view of Castel dell’Ovo (Castle of the Egg) and the Pizzofalcone Hill from the west, possibly from the sea. The twin peaks of Monte Somma and Vesuvius, with its smoking crater, rise beyond the headland of the castle. A similar vista can be seen in more detail on folio 41 verso (D15635; Turner Bequest CLXXXIV 40a).
1
Finberg erroneously described them as views of Capua: Finberg 1909, p.544.
2
The port of Naples has undergone extensive redevelopment since the early nineteenth century but the approximate position of the lighthouse was near the present-day ferry terminal of Molo Angioino (Stazione Marittima).
3
See for example Thomas Jones (1742–1803), The Bay of Naples and the Mole Lighthouse 1782 (Tate, T08246) and John Robert Cozens (1752–1797), Vesuvius and Somma from the Mole at Naples, (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). Both reproduced in Francis W. Hawcroft, Travels in Italy 1776–1783: Based on the “Memoirs” of Thomas Jones, exhibition catalogue, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester 1988, nos.110 and 112, pp.94–9.
Verso:
Blank

Nicola Moorby
May 2010

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘The Mole Lighthouse, Naples; and a View of Castel dell’Ovo and Pizzofalcone from the West 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 2010, 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-the-mole-lighthouse-naples-and-a-view-of-castel-dellovo-and-r1138087, accessed 19 April 2024.