J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Ancona from below the Cathedral 1819

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 81 Verso:
Ancona from below the Cathedral 1819
D14638
Turner Bequest CLXXVI 77a
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 82 recto opposite (D14639; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 78). The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘Harbour of Ancona’): ‘from the heights near the Cathedral’.1 The viewpoint appears to be about where one of the hairpin bends on the Via Papa Giovanni XXIII turns beside the church of Santi Pellegrino e Teresa (out of sight to the left) south of the Cathedral of San Ciriaco, here looking south to the Cittadella (now heavily wooded), and the arc of hills beyond the bay to the south-west.
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, ‘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-ancona-from-below-the-cathedral-r1186374, accessed 26 April 2024.