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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Switzerland 1802 > Studies in the Louvre Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Commentary on Anthony Van Dyck's 'Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio' (Inscription by Turner) 1802

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Commentary on Anthony Van Dyck's 'Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio' (Inscription by Turner)’ 1802
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 33 Recto:
Commentary on Anthony Van Dyck’s ‘Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio’ (Inscription by Turner) 1802
D04316
Turner Bequest LXXII 33
Inscribed by Turner in black ink (see main catalogue entry), on white wove paper prepared with a reddish brown wash, 128 x 114 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘33’ top left (inverted)
Stamped in black ‘LXXII–33’ top left (inverted)
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner’s notes (written with the sketchbook inverted) read:
Portrait of Cardinal Benvolontino [Finberg: Benvolutini ?] | This piece of Nature is painted | upon a Brown ground inclining to a | green but when the first cold colour come upon it appear a purplish grey | near the color of Flesh which placed | by the picture appears a tone of shadow oppos’d to the lights which | are warm without being yellow | and which appears to be given by a scumbling [Finberg: crumbling] color as the parts that have been repaired with solid color | are heavy. Those which are rendered by a Brown scumble sometimes are Umber without its dirt and inclined | to a purple. The Red Drapery is vermilion and L. Red glazed with Lake or good Vn Rd. The ground can be trac’d through all.
Finberg at first misread Turner’s note of the sitter’s name and did not identify the picture. However later, in handwritten annotations to a grangerised copy of his book (Tate Library) he recognised it as Van Dyck’s 1623 portrait of Cardinal Bentivoglio (Palazzo Pitti, Florence). The picture had belonged to the Medici, and was brought to Paris with other seizures from the collections of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany. It was returned to Italy after the war. Joseph Farington saw it hanging, apparently in the Grande Galerie, ‘for the first time’ on 25 September. He thought it ‘evidently painted when Vandyke was studying the works of Titian, and it would rank with the pictures of that Great Master. For breadth, purity of Colour, and truth of Character, I have scarcely seen it exceeded.’1
As noted by Venning and Bachrach, the portrait divided opinion between its French captors, who thought it poorly drawn and inadequately finished, and its British admirers. In his annotations to his copy of Martin Archer Shee’s Elements of Art (private collection), Turner told a ‘trifling anecdote’ of their differences to illustrate the perceived gulf between the two schools. The British artists who praised ‘its amazing power of Breadth colour and apparent ease and facility of execution’ had gone to some trouble to ascertain what their French colleagues thought of a work that ‘seemed to merit such universal suffrage’; they discovered that they looked upon it ‘with an eye of pity for our taste’, and ‘all our admiration was their astonishment’.2

David Blayney Brown
July 2005

1
Kenneth Garlick and Angus Macintyre eds., The Diary of Joseph Farington, vol.V, New Haven and London 1979, p.1876 (25 September 1802).
2
40 Venning ‘1983’ for 1982, p.46; and see also Barry Venning, Turner, London 2003, p.66.

How to cite

David Blayney Brown, ‘Commentary on Anthony Van Dyck’s ‘Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio’ (Inscription by Turner) 1802 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2005, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-commentary-on-anthony-van-dycks-cardinal-guido-bentivoglio-r1129725, accessed 30 June 2024.