Joseph Mallord William Turner

Landscape: Christ and the Woman of Samaria

?c.1825

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Not on display

Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 1473 x 2388 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference: N01875

Catalogue entry

433. [N01875] Landscape: Christ and the Woman of Samaria c. 1830

THE TATE GALLERY, LONDON (1875)

Canvas, 57 1/4 × 93 1/2 (145·5 × 237·5)

Coll. Turner Bequest 1856 (? 251, ‘1 (Scriptural subject)’ 7'10" × 4'10"); transferred to the Tate Gallery 1910.

Exh. On loan to the National Museum of Wales 1964–74; R.A. 1974–5 (486).

Lit. Armstrong 1902, p. 224; MacColl 1920, p. 28.

A large Italianate landscape of the kind exhibited by Turner from Bay of Baiae (No. 230 [N00505]) onwards, but here perhaps not carried quite to the degree of finish he deemed necessary for an exhibited work of this character. It is probably the ‘Scriptural subject’ listed as no. 251 [N00556] in the Schedule of the Turner Bequest and seems to show Christ and the Woman of Samaria by Jacob's well (John iv, 6–7), set in a landscape with an Italian hill-town similar to but not the same as Tivoli (see No. 311 [N03388]). The composition, with a hill-town on the left and an avenue of trees on the right, is particularly close to Palestrina, begun in Rome in 1828 and exhibited at the R.A. in 1830 (No. 295 [N06283]).