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

Executed with the sketchbook turned horizontally, this study depicts fortifications with turrets and crenellations. Its cursory appearance makes a precise location difficult to identify conclusively, although the subject is likely the Fortezza Nuova, or ‘new fortress’, in Livorno. This red-brick fortress was built under the Medicis in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and appears elsewhere in the sketchbook on folios 2 recto, 3 verso and 70 recto (D21414, D21417, D21545).

For a general commentary on Turner’s visit to Livorno, together with a list of relevant works in the sketchbook, see under folio 68 verso (D21542). If correctly identified as Livorno, this study is out of sequence with the overall itinerary embodied by this sketchbook (see the Introduction), which begins near Genoa and ends near Livorno and Florence.

Technical notes:

The page is divided by a conspicuous horizontal crease, possibly a manufacturing fault.