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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Second Italian Tour 1828-9 > Marseilles to Genoa Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Distant View of Nice, from Mont Alban 1828

Image 1 of 2
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Distant View of Nice, from Mont Alban’ 1828
Folio 9 Verso:
Distant View of Nice, from Mont Alban 1828
D21150
Turner Bequest CCXXXI 9a
Pencil on white wove paper, 113 x 174 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
As the geographer and Turner researcher Roland Courtot has identified it, this sketch, with the page turned horizontally, depicts a view of Nice from the slopes of Mont Alban to the east of Nice, looking back south-west past the Château hill and the Baie des Anges to the Cap d’Antibes in the far distance.1 Visible in the top left-hand corner of the composition is the sixteenth-century fortress situated at the summit of the hill. Similar vistas can be found on folio 8 verso and the recto of this leaf (D21148–D21149).
In the top right-hand corner of the page is a small separate study of unidentified buildings within a mountainous landscape.

Nicola Moorby
March 2017

Revised by Hannah Kaspar
November 2024

1
See Roland Courtot, ‘Les Carnets de William Turner: Recherches d’identification et de localisation des dessins’, unpublished research notes, Université de Provence à Aix, April 2008, p.3, as ‘Nice’ (shared with former Tate cataloguer Nicola Moorby in email correspondence at that date).

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Distant View of Nice, from Mont Alban 1828’, catalogue entry, March 2017, revised by Hannah Kaspar, November 2024, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, February 2025, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/distant-view-of-nice-from-mont-alban-r1209828, accessed 15 April 2025.