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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Tour to the Alps 1836 > Val d'Aosta Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Three Sketches of Geneva, the Villa Diodati and a Farmhouse, Possibly in the Val d'Aosta 1836

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Three Sketches of Geneva, the Villa Diodati and a Farmhouse, Possibly in the Val d'Aosta’ 1836
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 50 Verso:
Three Sketches of Geneva, the Villa Diodati and a Farmhouse, Possibly in the Val d’Aosta 1836
D29131
Turner Bequest CCXCIII 50a
Pencil on white wove paper, 113 x 190 mm
Inscribed by Turner in Pencil ‘V[illa] Diodati’, ‘Milky Blue Water[?]’, ‘B Ringers House [?]’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This page contains three sketches:
i. (main sketch, above, drawn inverted in relation to the main numbered sequence of subjects in the sketchbook) The right section of a two-part panorama of the lake front and mouth of the River Rhône at Geneva, continued from the opposite page (D29132; Turner Bequest CCXCIII 51), and including the Hotel des Bergues here at the right.
ii. (below, inverted in relation to the main sketch) The south shore of Lake Geneva at Collonge near Geneva, from the lake, with the ‘V[illa] Diodati’, residence of the poet Lord Byron in 1816, on the hillside, although misleadingly inscribed on the shoreside house, which is possibly that in which Byron’s fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley stayed. Inscribed ‘Milky Blue Water[?]’ below.
iii. (right, drawn with the page in the upright position) A swift, thumbnail sketch of a wide, shallow-roofed farmhouse, with a round tower on a hill beyond. The scenery here looks more like the Val d’Aosta than the Lake Geneva area. Inscribed below (firmly but difficult to decipher) ‘B[?ell] Ringers House’.
For notes on the Rhône at Geneva see D29140; Turner Bequest CCXCIII 55 in this sketchbook.

David Hill
June 2010

How to cite

David Hill, ‘Three Sketches of Geneva, the Villa Diodati and a Farmhouse, Possibly in the Val d’Aosta 1836 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2010, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, February 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-three-sketches-of-geneva-the-villa-diodati-and-a-farmhouse-r1144677, accessed 25 April 2024.