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

The subject of this sketch is Massa, a Tuscan city located south-east of La Spezia and the Carrara marble quarries along the Ligurian coast. The Apuan Alps lie further inland, their jagged peaks forming the dramatic backdrop to this study. As noted by the geographer and Turner researcher Roland Courtot, the artist’s viewpoint appears to be from the north-west, recording the approach to Massa.1 Also featured here are the geometrical contours of the Carrara quarries, renowned for the superior quality of their marble reserves. The figures in the foreground may be quarriers busy at work transporting the blocks of marble. See folio 40 verso (D21491) for another view of Massa, and folio 51 verso (D21512) for a view of Carrara. During the same tour, Turner also produced a chalk, gouache and watercolour study of Carrara, viewed from Sarzana to the north-west (Tate, D36172; Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 314).

Turner likely travelled via Carrara in mid to late September 1828. As he later recalled in a letter of 13 October to his artist friend George Jones, this encounter gave him ‘a fit of the spleen’ when he contemplated the lucrative potential of the local marble, once placed in the skilled hands of a portrait sculptor. He wrote to Jones, ‘Tell that fat fellow [Sir Francis] Chantrey that I did think of him, then (but not the first or last time) of the thousands he had made out of those marble craigs which only afforded me a sour bottle of wine and a sketch; but he deserves everything which is good’.2