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 > Gandolfo to Naples Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Posillipo from Mergellina; and Part of a View of Naples from the Hill beneath Certosa di San Martino and Castel Sant'Elmo 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Posillipo from Mergellina; and Part of a View of Naples from the Hill beneath Certosa di San Martino and Castel Sant'Elmo’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 56 Recto:
Posillipo from Mergellina; and Part of a View of Naples from the Hill beneath Certosa di San Martino and Castel Sant’Elmo 1819
D15664
Turner Bequest CLXXXIV 54
Pencil on white wove paper, 122 x 197 mm
Inscribed by ?John Ruskin in blue ink ‘281’ bottom right and ‘54’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CLXXXIV 54’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This page contains two distinct landscape views. In the bottom right-hand corner is a rough sketch of Mergellina, a small fishing village and port about a mile west of Castel dell’Ovo in the main city of Naples. The vista looks south towards the distant coastline of Posillipo.
Also inverted on the page is another drawing which forms part of a panoramic view of Naples seen from the slopes of the hill just beneath the Certosa (Charterhouse) of San Martino and Castel Sant’Elmo. The composition continues on the opposite sheet of the double-page spread, see folio 55 verso (D15663; Turner Bequest CLXXXIV 53a), but this side depicts the vista looking east and south-east towards Vesuvius and the Sorrentine peninsula, with the Neapolitan coastline at Castel dell’Ovo in the middle distance. As Lindsay Stainton has identified, the view is very similar to that of a watercolour study in the Naples: Rome C. Studies sketchbook (Tate D16101; Turner Bequest CLXXXVII 13).1 There is also a further related prospect (Tate D16100; Turner Bequest CLXXXVII 12).

Nicola Moorby
May 2010

1
Briganti, Spinosa and Stainton 1990, p.134.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Posillipo from Mergellina; and Part of a View of Naples from the Hill beneath Certosa di San Martino and Castel Sant’Elmo 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 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-posillipo-from-mergellina-and-part-of-a-view-of-naples-from-r1138126, accessed 20 September 2024.