Joseph Mallord William Turner

This ‘colour beginning’ was recognised by Andrew Wilton1 as showing a view over Florence, looking north-west across the River Arno to the city with the Duomo in the distance on the right. Turner unusually produced two similar but distinct variant watercolours in about 1827 (Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry)2 and the following year (British Museum, London).3 Another version is long untraced, and its status as an autograph work is uncertain,4 as is that of a fourth, in a private collection.5 Of the Coventry and British Museum works, the former, with its figures to the right of central trees in the foreground, was the source for the engraving Florence in the 1828 edition of the annual Keepsake (Tate impressions: T05105, T06138; see the Introduction to this section). The other variant is superficially similar, but shows a group to the left of the trees and differs in many other smaller ways.

Towards the end of 1819, Turner spent time in Florence on the return leg of his first Italian tour, making drawings of the city from this direction in the Rome and Florence sketchbook (Tate D16571–D16573, D16590–D16594, D16596; Turner Bequest CXCI 51–52, 62a-64a, 65a). Although all the watercolours have come to be known conventionally as Florence, from San Miniato,6 implying a viewpoint in the vicinity of the basilica of San Miniato al Monte, in her catalogue entries for the sketches Nicola Moorby has noted Cecilia Powell’s observations on Turner’s manipulation of the scene,7 and instead placed the vantage points of D16590 and D16594, relatable to the 1827–8 works, somewhat further north near the church of San Salvatore al Monte.

In fact, Turner was already familiar with the prospect before his 1819–20 tour, having made a watercolour of Florence from the Chiesa al Monte (private collection),8 engraved in 1820 for James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour of Italy (Tate impressions: T06027, T05110, T06158); for the project in general, see Moorby’s Introduction to the ‘First Italian Tour 1819–20’ section of this catalogue. That view had been based on Hakewill’s own direct drawing, and although its foreground is radically different, the detailed background probably informed Turner’s later works,9 as his own sketches in the area were not very meticulous. The immediately striking difference in the 1827–8 watercolours is the introduction of what Wilton characterised as the ‘forceful central vertical’10 of a cypress tree with others descending over the brow of the hill to the right towards the river; they are not hinted at in the present work, but the ‘basic opposition of warm colours on the right – the salmon pinks and ochres of the city – to the cooler hues of the river on the left is essentially the same’.11 As is typical of such studies, there is no clear indication of any figures.