Joseph Mallord William Turner

In his 1909 Inventory, Finberg grouped this sheet1 with a sequence of drawings that he prefaced with a note explaining the difficulty of allocating either dates or, in many cases, subject matter, offering a general dating for the group of between 1802 and 1820.2

Although Finberg’s placing of the sheet towards the end of the list, together with his guess that the subject is Italian, implies that he considered it to have been executed around the time of Turner’s first Italian tour of 1819–20, there seems no strong reason to believe that to be the case. Neither trees nor buildings, in so far as the latter are distinct, are conclusively Italian, and the cloudy sky, sombre palette and overall handling suggest, on balance, that this is a work about 1800. The subject may have been observed in or near London.

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