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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > First Italian Tour 1819-20 > Venice to Ancona Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Ancona from below the Cathedral 1819

Image 1 of 2
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Ancona from below the Cathedral’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 82 Recto:
Ancona from below the Cathedral 1819
D14639
Turner Bequest CLXXVI 78
Pencil on white wove paper, 111 x 184 mm
Partial watermark ‘Allnutt | 18’
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘78’ bottom right (now faint)
Stamped in black ‘CLXXVI – 78’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The drawing continues across folio 81 verso opposite (D14638; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 77a). The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘Harbour of Ancona’): ‘from the heights near the Cathedral’.1 The viewpoint appears to be about where one of the hairpin bends on the Via Papa Giovanni XXIII turns beside the church of Santi Pellegrino e Teresa south of the Cathedral of San Ciriaco, here looking west to the lighthouse which formerly stood towards the end of the pier on the north side of the harbour, with the coast on the far side of the bay above to the left. There is a more detailed view of the pier and lighthouse from lower down on folio 83 verso (D14462; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 79a).
For Cecilia Powell and James Hamilton’s comments on Turner’s varied and extensive coverage of Ancona, which takes up most of the last quarter or so of this sketchbook, see under folio 69 verso (D14514; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 65a).2

Matthew Imms
March 2017

1
Undated MS note by C.F. Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Tate Britain Prints and Drawings Room, I, p.519.
2
See Powell 1984, pp.92–3, 466 note 109, Powell 1987, pp.25, 202 note 45, and Hamilton 1997, pp.198, 325 note 13.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Ancona from below the Cathedral 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, March 2017, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, July 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-ancona-from-below-the-cathedral-r1186375, accessed 02 April 2026.