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 > Turin, Como, Lugarno, Maggiore ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Part of a View of Turin from the East, near the Monte dei Cappucini 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Part of a View of Turin from the East, near the Monte dei Cappucini’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 25 Verso:
Part of a View of Turin from the East, near the Monte dei Cappucini 1819
D14193
Turner Bequest CLXXIV 24 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 111 x 186 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in blue ink ‘Joins 25 nicely’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turin was the first major Italian city which Turner reached on his 1819 tour and he made a large number of sketches in and around the city. This sketch represents part of a view of Turin from the heights to the east. The composition continues on the opposite sheet of the double-page spread, see folio 26 (D14194; Turner Bequest CLXXIV 25), but visible on this side is the prominent Church of Santa Maria al Monte, which stands on a hill known as the Monte dei Cappuccini above the eastern (right) bank of the River Po. For further sketches of Turin see folio 12 (D14166; Turner Bequest CLXXIV 11). For a similar contemporaneous view see a drawing by James Hakewill (1778–1843), Turin from the Road to the Vagine di La Reine (British School at Rome).1
The drawing was selected by Ralph Nicholson Wornum for the Second Loan Collection, a group of sixty-two works exhibited in the provinces during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 It was removed from the sketchbook and displayed within a mount. Consequently, like the other works included in those tours, the page has suffered badly from over-exposure to light and the paper has yellowed considerably.

Nicola Moorby
December 2012

1
Tony Cubberley and Luke Herrmann, Twilight of the Grand Tour: A Catalogue of the drawings by James Hakewill in the British School at Rome Library, Rome 1992, no.2.15, p.131, reproduced.
2
Warrell 1991, pp.43–5.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Part of a View of Turin from the East, near the Monte dei Cappucini 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, December 2012, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, August 2013, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-part-of-a-view-of-turin-from-the-east-near-the-monte-dei-r1142714, accessed 25 April 2024.