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 ... > Trieste, Graz and Danube Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Trieste Cathedral and the Castello di San Giusto; the Harbour and Gulf from the Ramparts 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Trieste Cathedral and the Castello di San Giusto; the Harbour and Gulf from the Ramparts’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 59 Recto:
Trieste Cathedral and the Castello di San Giusto; the Harbour and Gulf from the Ramparts 1840
D30113
Turner Bequest CCXCIX 59
Pencil on cream wove paper, 127 x 198 mm
Partial watermark ‘atman’
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘59’ top right, ascending vertically
Stamped in black ‘CCXCIX – 59’ top right, ascending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the page turned horizontally, the main view is westwards, looking down from the bastions of Trieste’s Castello di San Giusto to the lighthouse at the south-west end of the harbour.
Above is an elevation of the San Giusto complex, with the west end of Trieste Cathedral on the right, with the castellated walls of the central keep beyond, running north on the left to the corner tower above its rounded bastion. The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘Town beside river’): ‘Cathedral at Trieste’.1 This is one of a sequence of views in and around the Adriatic port city, made working inwards from the back of this sketchbook, which Bell had similarly noted as such overall; see under folio 57 recto (D30109).2

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
Undated MS note by Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.969.
2
See ibid.; see also Powell 1995, pp.66, 81 note 18.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Trieste Cathedral and the Castello di San Giusto; the Harbour and Gulf from the Ramparts 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-trieste-cathedral-and-the-castello-di-san-giusto-the-harbour-r1196963, accessed 24 April 2024.