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

Finberg’s terse if tentative title for this work, ‘Loretto (?)’,1 evokes the oil painting The Loretto Necklace, which Turner painted after returning from his second Italian tour early in 1829 ready for the Royal Academy exhibition that spring (Tate N00509).2 As Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll note, Turner had visited Loreto (sic), near Ancona on Italy’s east coast, on his way back from Rome, and based the distant prospect of the hill town on a pencil drawing in the Rimini to Rome sketchbook (Tate D14888–D14889; Turner Bequest CLXXVIII 32a–33).3

Eric Shanes has tentatively relayed Finberg’s identification,4 and notes that the sheet was manufactured in 1828;5 the rapid and near monochrome ‘colour beginning’ suggests the essentially simple composition of the 1829 painting, divided between the steep hill with buildings on the skyline at the right and the valley on the left dominated by a single tree with thick foliage in the foreground. However, the resemblance may be generic, as such idealised compositions essentially follow the model of Claude Lorrain (1604/5–1682), whom Turner greatly admired and often emulated;6 compare the arrangement in the first of the Liber Studiorum’s Claude-like ‘E.P.’ compositions, Woman with Tambourine, designed more than twenty years before The Loretto Necklace (see the entry for Tate D08103; Turner Bequest CXVI B).

Shanes has also suggested a connection with the watercolour Lake Albano of about 1828 (private collection),7 engraved for The Keepsake in 1829 (Tate impressions: T04614, T04615).8 Compare also several other muted ‘colour beginnings’ with dark, isolated trees, Tate D25167, D25175, D25208 and D25275 (Turner Bequest CCLXIII 45, 53, 86, 153); the first and third of these are also on 1828 paper.

Verso:

Blank; laid down.