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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Second Italian Tour 1828-9 > Lyons to Marseilles Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Tour du Fanal and Fort Saint-Jean, Marseille 1828

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Tour du Fanal and Fort Saint-Jean, Marseille’ 1828
Folio 53 Recto:
The Tour du Fanal and Fort Saint-Jean, Marseille 1828
D21092
Turner Bequest CCXXX 52
Pencil on cream lined wove paper, 111 x 145 mm
Inscribed in blue ink by John Ruskin ‘52’ top left, ascending vertically, and ‘4’ top right, ascending vertically
Stamped in black ink ‘CCXXX 52’ top left, upside down
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner likely reached Marseille in early September 1828, and apparently spent several days sketching the old port and its surrounding fortifications. Besides sketching, he also found time for a swim, a means of coping with the intense heat: as he later recalled in a letter to his friend the artist George Jones, ‘until I got a plunge into the sea at Marseilles, I felt so weak that nothing but the change of scene kept me onwards to my distant point.’1 As noted by the geographer and Turner researcher Roland Courtot, this sketchbook shows Turner’s fascination with the port area, the city’s economic hub, shown here as a hive of activity.2 During this time, the port was recovering from the disruption to maritime trade resulting from the Continental blockade during the Napoleonic era. Turner also studied the city’s seventeenth-century fortifications surrounding the port, and particularly the distinctive domed tower of the Tour du Fanal, visibly in many of the following sketches. In total, twenty-seven pages record Turner’s impressions of Marseille, making it the most comprehensively examined location in the entire sketchbook. See folios 46 verso, 49 recto, 53 recto–64 recto, and 65 verso–66 recto (D21079, D21084, D21092–D21114, D21117–D21118; Turner Bequest CCXXX 45a, 48, 52–63 and 64a–65).
Turner’s vantage point here is from the south side of the port, near Fort Saint-Nicolas. Looking north across the water, he outlined with precision the cylindrical domed structure of the Tour du Fanal, a seventeenth-century watchtower built to guide merchant ships. As Courtot pointed out, it is possible that Turner was already familiar with this view from Joseph Vernet’s L’Entrée du port de Marseille, 1754 (Musée du Louvre, Paris), which was engraved and circulated in London in the 1760s.3
The Tour du Fanal also appears in two later watercolour and gouache studies by Turner (Tate D24704 and D29025; Turner Bequest CCLIX 139 and CCXCII 74). The latter was incorrectly linked in Finberg’s 1909 Inventory of the Bequest to the artist’s Meuse-Moselle-Rhine tour from around 1834.4

Hannah Kaspar
March 2024

1
John Gage (ed.), Collected Correspondence of J.M.W. Turner, Oxford 1980, p.119 no.141.
2
Roland Courtot, ‘6. Le carnet du voyage de Turner de Lyon à Marseille (CCXXX)(3)’, Carnets de voyage de Turner, accessed 29 January 2024, https://carnetswt.hypotheses.org/528.
3
Roland Courtot, ‘Turner à Marseille en 1828: géographie d’un regard’, in Histoire de l’Art, no.65, 2009, p.75.
4
Finberg 1909, II, p.943.

How to cite

Hannah Kaspar, ‘The Tour du Fanal and Fort Saint-Jean, Marseille 1828’, catalogue entry, March 2024, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, February 2025, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/the-tour-du-fanal-and-fort-saint-jean-marseille-r1209752, accessed 27 June 2025.