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 > Como and Venice Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Buildings, Perhaps at a Quayside with Moored Sailing Boats 1819

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Buildings, Perhaps at a Quayside with Moored Sailing Boats’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 43 Verso:
Buildings, Perhaps at a Quayside with Moored Sailing Boats 1819
D40722
Pencil on white wove paper, 226 x 287 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, and not mentioned in Finberg’s 1909 Inventory,1 this slight drawing shows two tall, barely articulated buildings with shallow roofs at the left, with slight vertical strokes and a curved shape suggesting masts the masts of small boats and a partly furled sail; the setting is perhaps a quay with warehouses. Either side of the centre are very faint indications of similar roofs with the eaves apparently at eye level, seemingly independent of the left-hand group.
The subject was presumably sketched directly at an actual location, but whether on Lake Como or in Venice (see the watercolours which were originally pages at the other end of this sketchbook; D15251–D15252, D15254–D15256, D15258; Turner Bequest CLXXXI 1, 2, 4–7), or somewhere entirely different, is likely to remain unresolved. This is the only drawing at the back of the book as foliated, after a run of twenty-nine completely blank leaves, and it is possible that Turner used it before the 1819–20 Italian tour (other leaves being watermarked 1816) or took it up again briefly later on.

Matthew Imms
March 2017

1
See A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.I, p.535.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Buildings, Perhaps at a Quayside with Moored Sailing Boats 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-buildings-perhaps-at-a-quayside-with-moored-sailing-boats-r1186435, accessed 26 April 2024.