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 The City and Harbour of Ancona, from below the Cathedral 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The City and Harbour of Ancona, from below the Cathedral’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 79 Verso:
The City and Harbour of Ancona, from below the Cathedral 1819
D14634
Turner Bequest CLXXVI 75a
Pencil on white wove paper, 111 x 184 mm
Partial watermark ‘Allnutt | 18’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The drawing continues across folio 80 recto opposite (D14635; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 76), where the harbour is seen. The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘Harbour of Ancona’): ‘Panorama from the Cathedral’.1 From the alignment of the dome of the church of Santi Pellegrino e Teresa to the south-east above the skyline beyond, Turner’s viewpoint appears to have been at about the first hairpin bend of the Via Papa Giovanni XXIII snaking down from the Cathedral of San Ciriaco, although this part of the prospect is now obscured by roadside trees and is better appreciated from higher up outside the cathedral. Towards the gutter and continuing across it is the Cittadella to the south, now heavily wooded.
For Cecilia Powell and James Hamilton’s comments on Turner’s varied and extensive coverage of Ancona, which takes up most of the last quarter or so of this sketchbook, see under folio 69 verso (D14514; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 65a).2

Matthew Imms
March 2017

1
Undated MS note by C.F. Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Tate Britain Prints and Drawings Room, I, p.519.
2
See Powell 1984, pp.92–3, 466 note 109, Powell 1987, pp.25, 202 note 45, and Hamilton 1997, pp.198, 325 note 13.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The City and Harbour of Ancona, from below the Cathedral 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-the-city-and-harbour-of-ancona-from-below-the-cathedral-r1186370, accessed 25 April 2024.