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

With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner profiled a distant hilltop town, outlining its craggy fortifications and towers. Shading is used sparingly at the foot of the slopes to suggest patches of woodland, and a ‘Road’ surrounding the hill has been labelled twice. The artist’s faint upper-left inscription ‘O[?rvi]’ is presumably a reference to Orvieto in Terni. If correctly identified as such, this subject would fall outside the sketchbook’s overall itinerary, which begins just south of Florence and ends in Orvieto. For a more extensive exploration of Orvieto in the final section of the sketchbook, see folios 30 recto–38 verso (D21646–D21663).

In the left margin is a minor study of the same subject from further away, executed with the sketchbook turned upright. Largely illegible, the scrawled inscriptions to the right were perhaps written from a moving carriage.