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 > Pompeii, Amalfi, &c., Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Two Small Landscape Sketches, Including One of a Gorge at Sorrento 1819

Image 1 of 2
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Two Small Landscape Sketches, Including One of a Gorge at Sorrento’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 1 Verso:
Two Small Landscape Sketches, Including One of a Gorge at Sorrento 1819
D15740
Turner Bequest CLXXXV 1 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 113 x 189 mm
Inscribed by the artist in pencil ‘Bridge’ and ‘Sorreto’ bottom of sketch, top right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This page contains two small landscape sketches. The details are too rough to conclusively identified but Turner’s inscription in the right-hand view appears to indicate that this may be a view looking out to sea from the steep winding road which leads down the side of a gorge to the Marina Piccola in Sorrento. A related drawing can be found on folio 64 (D15855; Turner Bequest CLXXXV 63). Near contemporaneous studies of the same or similar location were made by the German painter Heinrich Carl Reinhold (1788–1824).1

Nicola Moorby
September 2010

1
See for example Grotto near Sorrento with Bridge 1823 (Hamburger Kunsthalle), reproduced in Philip Conisbee, Sarah Faunce, Jeremy Strick, In the Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open-Air Painting, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington 1996, no.73, p.201.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Two Small Landscape Sketches, Including One of a Gorge at Sorrento 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 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-two-small-landscape-sketches-including-one-of-a-gorge-at-r1138206, accessed 26 April 2024.