Joseph Mallord William Turner Two Sketches of the Town and Bay of Pozzuoli from the Solfatara Crater 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 74 Verso:
Two Sketches of the Town and Bay of Pozzuoli from the Solfatara Crater 1819
D15702
Turner Bequest CLXXXIV 72 a
Turner Bequest CLXXXIV 72 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 122 x 197 mm
Inscribed by the artist in pencil ‘nr Villa Sib[?lon] | Monte Coelia’ bottom left and ‘Road’ and ‘Mt Torra’ and ‘country of the [?Pozzoli] skin x’ bottom centre, and ‘C Baiae’ and ‘vines’ above line of horizon, lower sketch
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
References
1909
A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.I, p.545, as ‘Views of the Gulf of Pozzuoli, from “near Villa....Monte Coelia” (?)’.
1984
Cecilia Powell, ‘Turner on Classic Ground: His Visits to Central and Southern Italy and Related Paintings and Drawings’, unpublished Ph.D thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London 1984, p.180 note 42.
1987
Cecilia Powell, Turner in the South: Rome, Naples, Florence, New Haven and London 1987, p.79 note 35.
The sweeping vista across the Bay of Pozzuoli from the east is one of the most celebrated views in the Gulf of Naples and an established subject in the Neapolitan vedute tradition.1 Turner’s viewpoint for the sketches on this page appears to from a location on the slopes above the Solfatara crater, probably very near the Santuario di San Gennaro on present-day Via San Gennaro Agnano. The foreground details and inscriptions suggest that he is standing in a vineyard or gardens of a small villa. The prospect looks south-west past the town of Pozzuoli on the spur of coastline in the middle distance, towards Baiae on the other side of the semi-circular bay with the distinctive promontory of the Cape of Misenum (Capo Miseno) and the islands of Procida and Ischia. Also at the bottom of this page is a separate small study with inscriptions.
Related views can be seen on folios 57 verso and 74 (D15667 and D15701; Turner Bequest 55a and 72), and in the Naples, Paestum, Rome sketchbook (Tate D16068; Turner Bequest CLXXXVI 80a), whilst a similar prospect can also be found in the Naples: Rome C. Studies sketchbook (Tate D16105; Turner Bequest CLXXXVII 17).
Nicola Moorby
June 2010
See for example Gabriele Ricciardelli (active 1740s–1780s), The Bay of Pozzuoli, (private collection, Rome), and Jacob Philipp Hackert (1737–1807), The Bay of Pozzuoli 1798 (private collection, Naples), both reproduced in colour in Giuliano Briganti, Nicola Spinosa and Lindsay Stainton, In the Shadow of Vesuvius: Views of Naples from Baroque to Romanticism 1631–1830, exhibition catalogue, Accademia Italiana delle Arti e delle Arti Applicate, London 1990, pp.57 and 74.
How to cite
Nicola Moorby, ‘Two Sketches of the Town and Bay of Pozzuoli from the Solfatara Crater 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2010, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www