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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Italianate Landscapes and Classical ... > Colour Studies of Idealised Italianate ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner An Island with Buildings, Perhaps on Lake Maggiore c.1828

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘An Island with Buildings, Perhaps on Lake Maggiore’ c.1828
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
An Island with Buildings, Perhaps on Lake Maggiore c.1828
D25301
Turner Bequest CCLXIII 179
Watercolour on white wove paper, 309 x 491 mm
Watermark ‘C Ansell | 1828’
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram towards bottom right
Inscribed in red ink ‘179’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCLXIII – 179’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Andrew Wilton1 and Eric Shanes have suggested a possible connection between this ethereal, sunlit scene of buildings across water and the watercolour Arona, Lago Maggiore of about 1828 (private collection),2 engraved for The Keepsake in 1829 (Tate impression: T05106); it perhaps shows one of the Borromean Islands,3 ‘albeit without any of the distant mountains that surround that large expanse of water’4 on the Swiss-Italian border south of the Alps.
Tate D25140 (Turner Bequest CCLXIII 18) is a similar composition, and was once joined to this work, as discussed in the technical notes below.
1
See Wilton 1975, p.94.
2
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.384 no.730, reproduced.
3
See Shanes 1997, p.98; see also p.94.
4
Shanes 1997, p.29.
Technical notes:
Eric Shanes has noted that this sheet was originally half of a larger one, the other part being Tate D25140 (Turner Bequest CCLXIII 18).1
1
See ibid., pp.29, 94.
Verso:
Blank; inscribed by ?John Ruskin in pencil ‘AB 150 P | O’ bottom right; inscribed in pencil ‘CCLXIII | 179’ bottom right; stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram over ‘CCLXIII – 179’ bottom right.

Matthew Imms
August 2016

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘An Island with Buildings, Perhaps on Lake Maggiore c.1828 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 2016, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, March 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-an-island-with-buildings-perhaps-on-lake-maggiore-r1185715, accessed 17 July 2024.