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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Venice, Austria and Southern Germany ... > Rotterdam to Venice Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner A Town in a Mountain Valley ?in the Tyrol Alps or Dolomites 1840

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Town in a Mountain Valley ?in the Tyrol Alps or Dolomites’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 28 Verso:
A Town in a Mountain Valley ?in the Tyrol Alps or Dolomites 1840
D32316
Turner Bequest CCCXX 28a
Pencil on white wove paper, 89 x 149 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘River’ towards bottom left
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The main drawing was made with the page turned horizontally, from a high vantage point near what is likely a wayside shrine in the foreground. In the river valley below is a town or village clustered round a slender Baroque spire, with a distant castle on the rocky skyline beyond. At the bottom left, framed by pencil lines, is a thumbnail sketch of what seems to be much the same view, this time with dark trees in the foreground.
A long sequence of sketches, mostly characterised as ‘Mountains’ by Finberg (with occasional identifications and transcriptions of the place names marked by the artist), lies between folios 7 recto and 76 recto (D32275–D32411).1 See the sketchbook’s Introduction for the likely overall route between Bregenz and Venice.2

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
See Finberg 1909, II, pp.1030–2.
2
See also Cecilia Powell, Turner in Germany, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1995, pp.65, 81 note 9.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘A Town in a Mountain Valley ?in the Tyrol Alps or Dolomites 1840 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2018, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-a-town-in-a-mountain-valley-in-the-tyrol-alps-or-dolomites-r1196550, accessed 18 September 2024.