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 Harbour; Dockyard Equipment; a Fallen Tree 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Trieste Harbour; Dockyard Equipment; a Fallen Tree’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 61 Verso:
Trieste Harbour; Dockyard Equipment; a Fallen Tree 1840
D30118
Turner Bequest CCXCIX 61a
Pencil on cream wove paper, 127 x 198 mm
Partial watermark ‘J. Wha’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the page turned horizontally, towards the top the main view is from the south side of Trieste’s harbour. The lighthouse, operational from 1833, still stands on its castellated base, but was superseded in the 1920s by the monumental Faro della Vittoria, north of the city.1 At the centre appears to be a separate study of dockside equipment, including a crane or hoist. Below is what is presumably an unrelated study of a dead, fallen tree.
The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘Quay beside river’): ‘Trieste’.2 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).3

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
See ‘Fanale – Lanterna’, Istria on the Internet, accessed 23 April 2018, http://www.istrianet.org/istria//architecture/lighthouses/trieste-lanterna.htm.
2
Undated MS note by Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.969.
3
See ibid.; see also Powell 1995, pp.66, 81 note 18.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Trieste Harbour; Dockyard Equipment; a Fallen Tree 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-harbour-dockyard-equipment-a-fallen-tree-r1196968, accessed 26 April 2024.