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 View of the Baths of Caracalla and San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome, from Santa Balbina 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘View of the Baths of Caracalla and San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome, from Santa Balbina’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 45 Recto:
View of the Baths of Caracalla and San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome, from Santa Balbina 1819
D16373
Turner Bequest CLXXXIX 45
Pencil and red chalk with traces of grey watercolour wash on white wove ‘Valleyfield’ paper, 229 x 368 mm
Inscribed by the artist in pencil ‘water’ centre left-hand edge and ‘[?red] [...]’ centre left
Inscribed by an unknown hand in pencil ‘45’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CLXXXIX 45’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The subject of this sketch is the view looking south-east from Santa Balbina on the Aventine Hill. In the centre are the Baths of Caracalla, the remains of a large complex of ‘thermae’, or public baths, dating from 206 AD.1 Visible between a gap in the ruins are the two towers of the Porta San Sebastiano, the gate which leads from the Aurelian Walls to the Via Appia. The churches in the middle distance to the left of the Baths are San Sisto Vecchio (left), Santi Nereo e Achilleo (right), and San Giovanni a Porta Latina (further back right), and on the far left-hand side is the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano. Stretching into the distant Campagna is the long line of the ruined Aqua Claudia (Claudian Aqueduct). Turner has used naturalistic touches of red chalk to indicate the colour of the Roman brickwork.
The composition is very similar to one drawn by James Hakewill in 1817, Rome. Ruins of the Baths of Caracalla from the Convent of Sa. Balbina, (British School at Rome Library), which Turner would almost certainly have known from his work on Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour, just prior to his 1819 trip to Rome.2 A similar view from the Palatine Hill can be found on another page from this sketchbook (see Tate D16334; Turner Bequest CLXXXIX 8).

Nicola Moorby
July 2009

1
See Christopher Hibbert, Rome: The Biography of a City, London 1985, p.326.
2
Tony Cubberley and Luke Herrmann, Twilight of the Grand Tour: A Catalogue of the Drawings by James Hakewill in the British School at Rome Library, Rome 1992, no.3.35, p.216 reproduced.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘View of the Baths of Caracalla and San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome, from Santa Balbina 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-view-of-the-baths-of-caracalla-and-san-giovanni-in-laterano-r1132432, accessed 24 April 2024.