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 > Rome: Colour Studies Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Torre San Giovanni and St Peter's, Rome 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Torre San Giovanni and St Peter's, Rome’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 32 Verso:
Torre San Giovanni and St Peter’s, Rome 1819
D16359
Turner Bequest CLXXXIX 32 v
Pencil and traces of grey watercolour wash on white wove ‘Valleyfield’ paper, 229 x 368 mm
Stamped in black ‘CLXXXIX 32’ bottom centre right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The machicolated tower which is the subject of this sketch appears to be the Torre San Giovanni (Tower of St John), part of the medieval wall which forms the western boundary of the Vatican City. Turner’s viewpoint is from the south-west and on the right of the page he has very faintly added the outline of St Peter’s and the Vatican.
Turner drew this sketch on the blank verso of a page which had been covered with a grey watercolour wash (D16358). Unfortunately, owing to overexposure of the recto during the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, the sheet has suffered irreversible discolouration. Peter Bower has suggested that this is probably down to the high content of indigo in the grey watercolour wash, rather than properties within the paper.1

Nicola Moorby
July 2009

1
Peter Bower, Turner’s Papers: A Study of the Manufacture, Selection and Use of his Drawing Papers 1787–1820, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1990, p.120.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Torre San Giovanni and St Peter’s, Rome 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2009, 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-torre-san-giovanni-and-st-peters-rome-r1132427, accessed 23 April 2024.