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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Southern Germany, Austria and Venice ... > Venice up to Trento Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Street Scenes around the Piazza dei Signori, Treviso, with the Torre Civica and the Campanile of the Cathedral 1833

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Street Scenes around the Piazza dei Signori, Treviso, with the Torre Civica and the Campanile of the Cathedral’ 1833
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 4 Verso:
Street Scenes around the Piazza dei Signori, Treviso, with the Torre Civica and the Campanile of the Cathedral 1833
D31604
Turner Bequest CCCXII 4a
Pencil on white laid paper, 203 x 109 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Finberg later annotated his 1909 Inventory entry (‘Street scene’): ‘Treviso ?’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy in the same way.2 Turner used the page vertically both ways up for three related views which do indeed show aspects of the city, on the mainland roughly twenty miles north of Venice. It is the first identified subject on the homeward journey embodied in this sketchbook, as set out in its Introduction.
The clocktower at the top is the Torre Civica, seen to the north across the Piazza dei Signori from the arcades of what is now the Via XX Settembre; it no longer features the cupola shown here and in an engraving of 1853.3 The other way up is a view from nearby, looking north-west along the present Via Indipenza to the campanile of the cathedral, with the Torre Civica again seen to the right above the roofline of the Palazzo di Podestà, and its cupola squeezed in as a continuation at the corner; the small thumbnail sketch below appears to be a variation or reprise.
There are what are likely other views on the recto (D31603) and, reflecting the somewhat haphazard use of this sketchbook, a slight sketch of one of the city gates on folio 97 verso (D31787).

Matthew Imms
May 2019

1
Undated MS note by Finberg (died 1939) in interleaved copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, opposite p.1005.
2
Undated MS note by Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.1005.
3
See ‘The Towers of Treviso’, Trevisoinfo.com, accessed 21 December 2018, https://www.trevisoinfo.com/towers.htm.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Street Scenes around the Piazza dei Signori, Treviso, with the Torre Civica and the Campanile of the Cathedral 1833 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 2019, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, March 2023, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-street-scenes-around-the-piazza-dei-signori-treviso-with-the-r1203802, accessed 25 November 2024.