- Description
-
- Creator(s)
- Thomas Girtin (1775-1802) and Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) after John Robert Cozens (1752-1797)
- Title
-
- A Wooded Shoreline on Lake Maggiore
- Date
- 1794 - 1797
- Medium and Support
- Graphite and watercolour on wove paper, on an early mount
- Dimensions
- 17.7 × 22.8 cm, 7 × 9 in
- Mount Dimensions
- 36.3 × 49.5 cm, 14 ¼ × 19 ½ in
- Object Type
- Collaborations; Monro School Copy
- Subject Terms
- Italian View: The North; Lake Scenery
-
- Collection
- Catalogue Number
- TG0754
- Description Source(s)
- Viewed in November 2017
Provenance
Dr Thomas Monro (1759–1833); his posthumous sale, Christie's, 28 June 1833, lot 78 as ‘A book containing 62 interesting sketches in the neighbourhood of Rome and Naples, by Turner, in Indian ink and blue’; bought by Thomas Griffith on behalf of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), £21; accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, 1856
Bibliography
Finberg, 1909, vol.2, p.1230 as 'Lake, with distant mountains' by Thomas Girtin; Bell and Girtin, 1935, p.76; Turner Online as 'On Lake Maggiore' by Joseph Mallord William Turner and Thomas Girtin (Accessed 09/09/2022)
Place depicted
Footnotes
- 1 The full diary entry, giving crucial details of the artists’ work at Monro’s house, is transcribed in the Documents section of the Archive (1798 – Item 2).
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About this Work
This view of the southern shoreline of Lake Maggiore, near Angera, is mounted in an album of watercolours that was bought by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) at the posthumous sale of Dr Thomas Monro (1759–1833) (Exhibitions: Christie’s, 28 June 1833, lot 78). The sixty-four drawings were the outcome of a unique collaboration between Girtin and Turner working together at Monro’s London home at the Adelphi. Here the artists were employed across three winters, probably between 1794 and 1797, to make ‘finished drawings’ from the ‘Copies’ of the ‘outlines or unfinished drawings of Cozens’ and other artists, amateur and professional, either from Monro’s collection or lent for the purpose. As the two young artists later recalled, Girtin generally ‘drew in outlines and Turner washed in the effects’. ‘They went at 6 and staid till Ten’, which may account for the generally monochrome appearance of the works, and, as the diarist Joseph Farington (1747–1821) reported, Turner received ‘3s. 6d each night’, though ‘Girtin did not say what He had’ (Farington, Diary, 12 November 1798).1
The view is based on a composition by John Robert Cozens (1752–97) that is known today from an on-the spot sketch that is inscribed and dated ‘on the Lago magiore – Octr 18’, meaning that the artist observed the view during the return leg of his second trip to the Continent, in the autumn of 1783 (see figure 1) (Bell and Girtin, 1935, no.405). The sketch is found in the sixth of the seven sketchbooks that are associated with a visit that began with a journey to Naples in the company of his patron William Beckford (1760–1844). It is unlikely that the Monro School watercolour was copied directly from the sketch by Cozens, however. It would have been uncharacteristic of Beckford to have lent the sketchbooks to Monro, and the existence of a large number of tracings of their contents by Cozens himself suggests that the patron, rather than the artist, retained the books. An album put together by Sir George Beaumont (1753–1827), now in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, includes more than seventy tracings from on-the-spot drawings in the first three of the sketchbooks, and these provided the basis for at least thirty Monro School works. There are only five tracings from the next three books, but there is no reason to think that others did not exist, and it was presumably from these lost copies by Cozens that as many as thirty-five more watercolours were produced by Girtin and Turner, including this, one of six views on Lake Maggiore (others including TG0755 and TG0759). The fact that the Monro School copies never follow either the shading or the distribution of light seen in the on-the-spot sketches, though they always replicate the basic outlines, further suggests that Girtin and Turner generally worked from a tracing of the sketchbook view, and surely that was the case here as well.
The album containing this drawing was sold in 1833 as the work of Turner, but the cataloguer of the Turner Bequest, Alexander Finberg, thought that Girtin alone was responsible for the watercolours, whilst more recently Andrew Wilton has established their joint authorship (Finberg, 1909, vol.2, p.1230; Wilton, 1984a, pp.8–23). Identifying the division of labour within Monro School drawings is considerably helped, as here, when the colour washes by Turner leave some of the pencil work untouched in order to create highlights. In practice, Girtin did little more than trace the general outlines of the composition and it was left to Turner to obscure the essentially mechanical task of replication, though in this case the monochrome washes are rather perfunctory and do little to add to the rather haphazard pencil work. In general, I am inclined to believe that such a falling off of standards in the Monro School subjects resulted from time pressures placed on Girtin and Turner, rather than indicating the intervention of other, anonymous hands in the work. Moreover, the poor quality of a given watercolour, in itself, does not indicate that it departed from the division of labour that the two artists themselves described to Farington in 1798.
1794 - 1797
Angera: The Borromeo Castle Overlooking Lake Maggiore
TG0755
1794 - 1797
Lake Maggiore, from Isola Bella
TG0759