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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Coast of the Gulf of Trieste; Hilly Landscapes; a Steamer in a Harbour; Two Women in Traditional Costume 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Inside Back Cover:
The Coast of the Gulf of Trieste; Hilly Landscapes; a Steamer in a Harbour; Two Women in Traditional Costume 1840
D30129
Turner Bequest CCXCIX 67
Pencil and chalk on cream wove paper, 127 x 198 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘[...]’ top centre, ?above and below shipping and figures
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘67’ top right, ascending vertically
Stamped in black ‘CCXCIX – 67’ top right, ascending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The page was largely used horizontally, and contains various landscape sketches, likely including the coast of the Gulf of Trieste, as on adjacent pages. A sequence of views in and around the Adriatic port city runs inwards from this end of the sketchbook; see under folio 57 recto (D30109).1 At the top centre there appears to be a quayside scene, likely at Trieste, with the tall, smoking funnel of a steamer.
There are also slight landscape sketches with distant spires and towers, two being in red chalk (the only use of the medium in this book); those at the gutter, including one with a cupola at the bottom left, continue a little way onto folio 66 verso opposite (D30128).
At the left, with the book turned vertically, are two women seen from the back, wearing what is likely traditional Slovenian costume, with full skirts and long white headscarves. Cecilia Powell noted them ‘with baskets’,2 but such elements are unclear. Compare a study of Tyrolean women in the contemporary Rotterdam to Venice sketchbook (Tate D32322; Turner Bequest CCCXX 31a).
1
See also Powell 1995, pp.66, 81 note 18.
2
Ibid., p.240.
Technical notes:
The page is effectively the rear paste-down, although it is numbered and stamped in sequence with the book’s leaves, implying that it was itself previously free. A strip of about 3 mm of an underlying sheet is visible at the fore-edge, below which the central leather pencil loop is secured, and seems to have been the paste-down as originally bound.
The accessioned page is creased and torn, with jagged losses at the corners and both shorter edges, and was presumably pasted down over the endpaper to secure it from further damage. There is brown staining at the top centre from the underlying loop.

Matthew Imms
September 2018

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Coast of the Gulf of Trieste; Hilly Landscapes; a Steamer in a Harbour; Two Women in Traditional Costume 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-the-coast-of-the-gulf-of-trieste-hilly-landscapes-a-steamer-r1196979, accessed 29 March 2024.