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

As noted by Andrew Wilton,1 this large ‘colour beginning’ informed a finished watercolour on a similar scale, Landscape: Composition of Tivoli, dated 1817, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1818 (private collection),2 and engraved in 1827 (Tate impression: T04502). With its central sun over water and classical architecture, the design evokes Claude Lorrain (1604/5–1682), whom Turner greatly admired and often emulated;3 compare for example the oil The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, exhibited in 1817 (Tate N00499).4 The Tivoli subject is one of a number of Italian views based on topographical drawings by other artists such as James Hakewill (1778–1843)5 which Turner produced in the years immediately preceding his first visit; see Nicola Moorby’s introduction to the ‘First Italian Tour 1819–20’ section of this catalogue.6

Indeed, Turner would not actually visit Tivoli, about twenty miles north-east of Rome, until 1819, when he recorded its dramatic setting and classical remains, including the well-known rotunda of the so-called ‘Temple of Vesta’, featured on the right of the 1817 watercolour, but only as a generalised form here. See for example Tate D16120 (Turner Bequest CLXXXVII 32) a view in the Naples: Rome. C. Studies sketchbook tinted in relatively ‘muted greys and greens’, as Diane Perkins has noted in relation to the atmosphere of the present idealised treatment.7 The temple features in numerous drawings in that sketchbook, as well as in the Tivoli to Rome and Tivoli books (Tate; Turner Bequest CLXXIX, CLXXXIII). Meanwhile, the word ‘Composition’ in the title of the exhibited watercolour perhaps hints at a deliberately capriccio-like approach to a landscape Turner had yet to explore, the juxtaposition of the natural and architectural elements being inaccurate to say the least, as Eric Shanes has explained.8

Wilton has characterised the present sheet as ‘a separate exercise, exploratory, as it were, rather than preparatory’;9 its ‘range of heavy colours’ is shared with others of the period such as Tate D17185 (Turner Bequest CXCVI U), another Tivoli study.10 He describes the ‘balance of abstract forms and restricted colour forces’ here, ‘founded on a contrast between pinkish-ochre or yellow, and pale blue ... punctuated by a strong green accent, confined to a single sector of the design’ to the left of centre, emphasising the ‘pattern of vertical bands’ playing off against the horizontal balance of sky and reflection; this would be made even more apparent in the finished composition, where ‘the right-hand block of tone is given a firm vertical boundary in the temple wall’, and the sunlit distance becomes ‘carefully modulated’ and ‘articulated by further, distant verticals.11

Compare another large ‘colour beginning’, Tate D36320 (Turner Bequest CCCLXV 29), which relates to the watercolour of the Rise of the River Stour at Stourhead (private collection),12 exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1825 and sometimes regarded as a pendant to the Tivoli composition.13 Turner appears to have recalled the latter in the early 1840s when he painted a generalised but evocative Landscape with Water (Tate N05513);14 for similar reworkings of the most Claude-like compositions from his Liber Studiorum at about that time, see the Introduction to the ‘Liber Studiorum c.1806–24’ section of this catalogue.

Verso:

Blank; somewhat darkened and stained. Inscribed in pencil ‘2’ at centre, upside down; inscribed in red ink ‘CXCVII.A’ bottom left; inscribed in pencil ‘CXCVII A’ below left of centre; stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram over ‘CXCVII – A’ bottom right.