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 Woman with ?Pots; Towers and a Spire in Mountain Valleys ?in the Tyrol Alps or Dolomites 1840

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Woman with ?Pots; Towers and a Spire in Mountain Valleys ?in the Tyrol Alps or Dolomites’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 30 Verso:
A Woman with ?Pots; Towers and a Spire in Mountain Valleys ?in the Tyrol Alps or Dolomites 1840
D32320
Turner Bequest CCCXX 30a
Pencil on white wove paper, 89 x 149 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Red’ top left, above figure
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The drawings here were made with the page turned horizontally both ways. At the left is an isolated study of a woman with what appear to be pots or other small items, perhaps at an inn or market; compare the annotated group of figures on the verso (D32320). At the outer edge, framed by pencil lines, are two small landscape studies; the one beside the woman shows trees above a rocky hillside or cliff. The second is the other way up, and features towers in a mountainous setting, as does the largest of the sketches here, also aligned with the gutter at the top, with a church spire, a castle on a crag further off, and two women 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 Woman with ?Pots; Towers and a Spire in Mountain Valleys ?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-woman-with-pots-towers-and-a-spire-in-mountain-valleys-in-r1196554, accessed 19 April 2024.