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

This is one of only two watercolour studies of Tivoli dating from Turner’s 1819 tour of Italy, and represents the edge of the town seen from the river valley to the north. The artist was particularly attracted by the spectacle of the town’s ancient ruins perched above the steep, wooded gorge and streaming waterfalls. This view depicts the prospect looking south-west from the road which skirts the end of the valley. On the left-hand side are the cascatelli (or cascatelle), the lesser cascades caused by a branch of the River Aniene emerging from an underground passage at the top of the slopes at the northern tip of the town. The vista rises to a medieval watch-tower, situated near the Piazza dell’Olmo (present-day Piazza Domenico Tani) and the campanile of the Cathedral (Duomo) of San Lorenzo. Silhouetted along the top of the slope at the centre of the middle distance are the long arcades of the Santuario di Ercole Vincitore (Sanctuary of Hercules the Victor), a first-century BC Roman temple dedicated to the cult of Hercules. In the far distance is the flat, open plain of the Roman Campagna.

Formerly known as the Villa of Maecenas, the Santuario di Ercole Vincitore was one of Tivoli’s most famous landmarks. Its picturesque qualities were described by Revd John Chetwode Eustace who, in A Classical Tour Through Italy, first published in 1813, recommended the view from the opposite side of the valley:

Turner made notes on this passage in the Italian Guide Book sketchbook (see Tate D13952; Turner Bequest CLXXII 11a). He would also have been familiar with other artists’ depictions of the temple. Compositional precedents for the view include John ‘Warwick’ Smith (1749–1831), Villa of Mecenas, an engraved plate from the publication Select Views in Italy, which Turner copied in the Italian Guide Book sketchbook (see Tate D13966; Turner Bequest CLXXII19), and a watercolour by John Robert Cozens (1752–1797), which Turner studied as a young man, see Tivoli, Villa of Maecenas, after John Robert Cozens ?circa 1794–7 (Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California). Compare also a contemporaneous drawing by James Hakewill (1778–1843), Villa of Maecenas and Cascatelle. Tivoli 1816 (British School at Rome Library), engraved for Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour of Italy, published in 1819.2

The temple features in many of Turner’s 1819 sketches looking both up and down the valley, and he also made detailed tonal studies of the architecture and the arched passageway underneath the ruin’s substructures (see for example Tate D15486; Turner Bequest CLXXXIII 20). It was the vista from the north-east however, which seems to have held the greatest visual appeal. Similar views can be found within this sketchbook (D16121; Turner Bequest CLXXXVII 33), as well as in the Tivoli and Rome sketchbook (D15013–D15014, D15018, D15025, D15029–D15030; Turner Bequest CLXXIX 46a–7, 48a, 53a, 55a–56), and in the Tivoli sketchbook (Tate D41397, D15469, D15506; Turner Bequest CLXXXIII verso of 1, 3 and 39). Turner later considered developing the view for the Tivoli vignette illustration for Rogers’s Italy, 1830 (see Tate D27605; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 88), and ultimately revisited it within an oil sketch, Tivoli, the Cascatelle circa 1827–8 (Tate, N03388) and an unfinished painting, Tivoli: Tobias and the Angel circa 1835 (Tate, N02067).3

It has been suggested in the past that Turner’s Tivoli watercolours were probably executed outside, directly from the motif.4 However, as Cecilia Powell has discussed, there is no evidence that the artist actually painted in the open air during his time in Italy. Several contemporary sources testify that his preference was for drawing on the spot and for colouring indoors away from the motif, since it took up ‘too much time to colour in the open-air’ and ‘he could make 15 or 16 pencil sketches to one colored’.5 It seems more likely therefore, that the basic outline of the composition was first sketched in pencil, possibly on-the-spot, and that the watercolour was added later from memory.6 Turner’s use of watercolour here is similar that of his coloured studies of the Roman Campagna in the same sketchbook (see D16122; Turner Bequest CLXXXVII 34). The lush, wooded hills have been created with a wide variety of textural effects including loose wash, energetic brushwork, and the application of the paint with fingers and a dry brush. The artist has also left areas of white paper blank, principally to depict the winding course of the river along the floor of the valley, and has scratched out highlights to indicate spray amidst the cascades on the left. By contrast, the sky and distant countryside are comprised of limpid wet-in-wet washes with bands of colour suffused into one another. The use of blue to describe distant buildings and the haze over the far horizon recalls the atmospheric effects of aerial perspective which characterise much of the work of Claude Lorrain.

John Ruskin described Turner’s sketches from nature in Tivoli as ‘unsurpassable’ and selected this watercolour as one of the works recommended to students for study.7 In a letter to the artist and expert copyist, William Ward (1829–1908), he wrote ‘I hold for the Tivoli [i.e. D16120] ... People who looked at that, must learn’.8 Ward executed a copy of this, and other Turners, to be placed in the Manchester Art Museum for didactic purposes.9 Meanwhile studies of the watercolour by Hercules Brabazon Brabazon (1821–1906) can also be found in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art,10 and in the British Museum.11

Technical notes:

Long detached from the Naples, Rome C. Studies sketchbook, this sheet was perhaps once folio 32 (see the concordance in the introduction).

Verso:

Blank, save for inscriptions by unknown hands in pencil ‘23’ centre, ‘CLXXXVII.32’ and ‘D16120’ bottom right; stamped in black ‘CLXXXVII 32’ bottom centre.