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 Two Landscape Sketches, including a Gorge at Sorrento 1819

Image 1 of 2
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Two Landscape Sketches, including a Gorge at Sorrento’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 64 Recto:
Two Landscape Sketches, including a Gorge at Sorrento 1819
D15855
Turner Bequest CLXXXV 63
Pencil on white wove paper, 113 x 189 mm
Inscribed by the artist in pencil ‘Sorrento’ bottom right of sketch parallel with left-hand edge
Inscribed by ?John Ruskin in blue ink ‘278’ top left, inverted and ‘63’ bottom left, inverted
Stamped in black ‘CLXXXV 63’ top left, inverted
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner’s inscription identifies the study at the top of this page as a view in Sorrento, probably the steep gorge behind the Marina Piccola and below the main centre of the town. A related drawing can be found on folio 1 verso (D15740) and near contemporaneous studies of the same or similar location were made by the German painter, Heinrich Carl Reinhold (1788–1824).1 There is a larger landscape sketch, executed on the horizontal face of the sheet but the details of this second view are too rough to be identified.

Nicola Moorby
November 2010

1
See for example Grotto near Sorrento with Bridge 1823 (Hamburger Kunsthalle), reproduced in Philip Conisbee, Sarah Faunce, Jeremy Strick, In the Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open-Air Painting, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington 1996, no.73, p.201.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Two Landscape Sketches, including a Gorge at Sorrento 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 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-two-landscape-sketches-including-a-gorge-at-sorrento-r1138324, accessed 05 April 2026.