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 The Arch of Trajan and Harbour Wall at Ancona, South-West of the Arsenale 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Arch of Trajan and Harbour Wall at Ancona, South-West of the Arsenale’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 78 Verso:
The Arch of Trajan and Harbour Wall at Ancona, South-West of the Arsenale 1819
D14632
Turner Bequest CLXXVI 74a
Pencil on white wove paper, 111 x 184 mm
Partial watermark ‘Allnutt | 18’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘Ancona’): ‘the Arch of Trajan from the mole to the North’.1 The viewpoint is north-east of the Arch of Trajan, looking along the fortified sea wall of the pier leading to the lighthouse (out of sight from this angle). The tower beyond the arch has gone, as have the Arsenale fortifications on the left, at the foot of the headland crowned by the Cathedral, in what is now a car park in a heavily industrialised area of the port.
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, ‘The Arch of Trajan and Harbour Wall at Ancona, South-West of the Arsenale 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-the-arch-of-trajan-and-harbour-wall-at-ancona-south-west-of-r1186368, accessed 04 July 2025.