Cozens’ on-the-spot sketch from 1782 is inscribed ‘A Range of Convents near Capo di Monti – Novr.24’, and to the right, ‘The Chinese Convent’ (Bell and Girtin, 1935, no.321). The sketch is found in the fifth of the seven sketchbooks from Cozens’ second Italian trip, which saw him travel 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 panoramic view near Capodimonte, overlooking the city of Naples. 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 worked from tracings of the sketchbook views. The ‘Chinese Convent’ noted by Cozens was actually a college for the training of missionaries to Asia.

The bulk of the works sold from Monro’s collection at his posthumous sale in 1833 were attributed to Turner alone, though this was to change following the pioneering article published in 1984 by Andrew Wilton (Wilton, 1984a, pp.8–23). Returning to the account given by the artists themselves to Farington in 1798, he established the joint attribution of many of the Monro School subjects, and a new generation of Turner scholars, including successive curators at The Whitworth, Manchester, followed his lead (Hartley, 1984, p.63). Identifying the division of labour within Monro School drawings is considerably helped, as here, when the colour washes leave much of the pencil work showing through. In this case, Girtin’s inventive and fluent hand is clearly apparent under Turner’s economical use of a simple monochrome palette. The work is notable for another reason, being one of a number of panoramic Monro School subjects that suggest that Girtin, in particular, learnt much from Cozens about how to organise a broader expanse of a landscape than was generally included in compositions in the 1790s.