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 > Remarks (Italy) Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Group of Figures at a Fountain, ?Rome c.1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Group of Figures at a Fountain, ?Rome’ c.1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 94 Verso:
Group of Figures at a Fountain, ?Rome circa 1819
D16865
Turner Bequest CXCIII 93 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 94 x 115 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This sketch depicts a group of figures gathered around a structure which may be a fountain, possibly in Rome. Finberg tentatively identified it as the Fontana dell’Acqua Acetosa, a seventeenth-century fountain near the banks of the Tiber to the north-east of the city. However, the Acqua Acetosa appears in other sketches by Turner from 1819 and these pictorial records reveal that it was not topped by a cross like this fountain, see for example St Peter’s sketchbook (Tate D16225; Turner Bequest CLXXXVIII 39a).

Nicola Moorby
March 2011

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Group of Figures at a Fountain, ?Rome c.1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, March 2011, 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-group-of-figures-at-a-fountain-rome-r1138640, accessed 22 September 2024.