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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Venice, Austria and Southern Germany ... > Rotterdam to Venice Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner A Town by a River below Mountains ?in the Dolomites; Mountain Peaks 1840

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Town by a River below Mountains ?in the Dolomites; Mountain Peaks’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 53 Verso:
A Town by a River below Mountains ?in the Dolomites; Mountain Peaks 1840
D32366
Turner Bequest CCCXX 53a
Pencil on white wove paper, 89 x 149 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The main drawing was made with the page turned horizontally. Featuring several fairly distinctive buildings near a low bridge across a river, with a winding mountain road beyond, its setting presently remains unidentified, but is perhaps likely from its context in this sketchbook to show somewhere in the Cadore district of the eastern Dolomites. The other way up at the bottom right is a smaller mountain view, possibly continued from the right of the main subject.
A long sequence of sketches, mostly characterised as ‘Mountains’ by Finberg (with occasional identifications and transcriptions of the place names marked by the artist), lies between folios 7 recto and 76 recto (D32275–D32411).1 See the sketchbook’s Introduction for the likely overall route between Bregenz and Venice.2

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
See Finberg 1909, II, pp.1030–2.
2
See also Cecilia Powell, Turner in Germany, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1995, pp.65, 81 note 9.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘A Town by a River below Mountains ?in the Dolomites; Mountain Peaks 1840 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2018, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-a-town-by-a-river-below-mountains-in-the-dolomites-mountain-r1196600, accessed 17 June 2025.