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 > Venice to Ancona Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner A Town above a River, Perhaps near Cesena or Rimini 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Town above a River, Perhaps near Cesena or Rimini’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 55 Verso:
A Town above a River, Perhaps near Cesena or Rimini 1819
D14589
Turner Bequest CLXXVI 51a
Pencil on white wove paper, 111 x 184 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The drawing continues half way across folio 56 recto opposite (D14590; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 52), where the ‘range of hills’ noted by Finberg in his bracketed title for both pages1 is shown in separate studies. The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘Town with river; also distant range of hills’) with ‘Rimini’,2 but the subject, a town above wooded river banks with a bridge in the distance, remains unconfirmed; Cesena and Rimini are depicted on adjacent pages.
Cecilia Powell has commented on the relatively uneventful phase of Turner’s journey between leaving Bologna and reaching Rimini (folios 43 recto–60 verso; D14566–D14598; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 39a–56a);3 for his overall route south-east between Bologna and Ancona, see the sketchbook’s Introduction.

Matthew Imms
March 2017

1
Finberg 1909, I, p.518.
2
Undated MS note by C.F. Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Tate Britain Prints and Drawings Room, I, p.518.
3
See Powell 1984, pp.89–90, 465 note 98.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘A Town above a River, Perhaps near Cesena or Rimini 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, March 2017, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, July 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-a-town-above-a-river-perhaps-near-cesena-or-rimini-r1186325, accessed 25 April 2024.