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 > Pompeii, Amalfi, &c., Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Part of a View from the Camaldoli Hill, with Lake Agnano and the Gulf of Pozzuoli 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Part of a View from the Camaldoli Hill, with Lake Agnano and the Gulf of Pozzuoli’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 75 Verso:
Part of a View from the Camaldoli Hill, with Lake Agnano and the Gulf of Pozzuoli 1819
D15876
Turner Bequest CLXXXV 73 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 113 x 189 mm
Inscribed by the artist in pencil ‘Lago A’ within sketch of lake on left
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This sketch is part of a panoramic 180-degree view from the hill of Camaldoli looking along the Tyrrhenian coastline from Vesuvius in the east to the Gulf of Pozzuoli in the west. Turner’s contemporary, James Hakewill (1778–1843), drew a similar vista in 1816 inscribed with the names of the principal landmarks.1 The composition continues on the opposite sheet of the double-page spread, see folio 76 (D15887; Turner Bequest CLXXXV 74) but the landmarks visible on this side include the distant islands of Procida and Ischia, the Bay of Baiae to Capo Miseno, and the Lake of Agnano (labelled ‘Lago A’ by the artist), a volcanic crater lake which was drained during the late nineteenth century and is now the site of a modern hippodrome. The curved stone bench in the right-hand foreground with seated figures represents the southern tip of the grounds of the Camaldolese monastery and can still be seen in situ today.
For a more detailed discussion and further views from Camaldoli see folio 73 (D15871; Turner Bequest CLXXXV 71).

Nicola Moorby
October 2010

1
View from the great Camaldoli above the city of Naples 1816 (British School at Rome Library), reproduced in Tony Cubberley and Luke Herrmann, Twilight of the Grand Tour: A catalogue of the drawings by James Hakewill in the British School at Rome Library, Rome 1992, no.5.42, reproduced p.270.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Part of a View from the Camaldoli Hill, with Lake Agnano and the Gulf of Pozzuoli 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, October 2010, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-part-of-a-view-from-the-camaldoli-hill-with-lake-agnano-and-r1138347, accessed 12 June 2025.