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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Meuse-Mosel, Luxembourg and Northern ... > Rivers Meuse and Moselle Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Imperial Baths, Trier 1824

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Imperial Baths, Trier’ 1824
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 96 Verso:
The Imperial Baths, Trier 1824
D19739
Turner Bequest CCXVI 95 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 78 x 118 mm
Inscribed in blue ink ‘1451’ top left (inverted)
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This undeveloped sketch shows part of the ruined bath complex which once belonged to Constantine’s Imperial Palace. Here we see the hollowed vestiges of a vaulted hall with rows of arches, remains which were most likely part of the principal caldarium or hot room.1 The ‘Kaiserthermen’ is recorded again on the folio opposite (Tate D19740; Turner Bequest CCXVI 96) and in a later sketch taken by Turner on his 1839 tour of the Moselle region: see Tate D28247; Turner Bequest CCLXXXVIII 44.

Alice Rylance-Watson
April 2014

1
John Bryan Ward-Perkins, Roman Imperial Architecture, New Haven and London, 1994, p.446.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘The Imperial Baths, Trier 1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, April 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-imperial-baths-trier-r1174530, accessed 22 September 2024.