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Works Thomas Girtin and Joseph Mallord William Turner after (?) John Robert Cozens

Rome: The Ruins of Tiberius' Villa on the Palatine Hill, from the Forum

1794 - 1797

Primary Image: TG0533: Thomas Girtin (1775–1802) and Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), after (?) John Robert Cozens (1752–97), Rome: The Ruins of Tiberius' Villa on the Palatine Hill, from the Forum, 1794–97, graphite and watercolour on wove paper, on an early mount, 20.3 × 26.7 cm, 8 × 10 ½ in. Tate, Turner Bequest CCCLXXIII, 21 (D36434).

Photo courtesy of Tate (All Rights Reserved)

Description
Creator(s)
Thomas Girtin (1775-1802) and Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) after (?) John Robert Cozens (1752-1797)
Title
  • Rome: The Ruins of Tiberius' Villa on the Palatine Hill, from the Forum
Date
1794 - 1797
Medium and Support
Graphite and watercolour on wove paper, on an early mount
Dimensions
20.3 × 26.7 cm, 8 × 10 ½ in
Mount Dimensions
36.3 × 49.5 cm, 14 ¼ × 19 ½ in
Inscription

‘Palatine Hill’ on the back, by Thomas Girtin (pasted down, but transcribed by a later hand on the bottom right of the mount)

Part of
Object Type
Collaborations; Monro School Copy
Subject Terms
Italian View: Ancient Rome

Collection
Catalogue Number
TG0533
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.1228 as '"Palatine Hill"' by Thomas Girtin; Turner Online as 'Rome: Buildings on the Palatine Hill' by Joseph Mallord William Turner and Thomas Girtin (Accessed 07/09/2022)

About this Work

This view from the Roman Forum looking towards the superstructure of Tiberius’ Villa, on the Palatine Hill, 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 Palatine Hill

Figure 1.
Francis Towne (1739–1816), The Palatine Hill, 1781, graphite, watercolour and pen and ink on laid paper, on an original mount, 32.8 × 47.3 cm, 12 ⅞ × 18 ⅝ in. British Museum, London (Nn,1.4).


Digital image courtesy of The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

As with the majority of the Italian views in Monro’s album, it has not been possible to trace the source of the work. However, even though only a small proportion of the sketches that John Robert Cozens (1752–97) made during his stay in Italy from November 1776 through to March 1779 survive, it is still likely that one of the numerous ‘outlines or unfinished drawings’ that he executed during his time in Rome provided the model here. Monro’s posthumous sale may have contained only a few sketches by Cozens, but, as Kim Sloan has argued, the patron must have borrowed outlines or tracings from purchasers at the auction of the artist’s work held in July 1794, which included twenty-seven ‘books of sketches’ and many hundreds of drawings made on his travels (Sloan and Joyner, 1993, pp.81–82). The subject of the work, which has hitherto been known as ‘Buildings on the Palatine Hill’, can be identified in greater detail, however. Like the watercolour of the same subject by Francis Towne (1739–1816), which is dated 1781 (see figure 1), the Monro School drawing shows the view from the Forum with the ruined superstructure of Tiberius’ Villa to the right, and this can also be seen in a second Monro School drawing based on a sketch taken from a different angle (TG0532). In contrast to this drawing, Towne includes a group of cows in reference to the common name for the Forum, the Campo Vaccino, or Cow Field.

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.1228; Wilton, 1984a, pp.8–23). 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. An architectural subject generally requires a more detailed underdrawing than a landscape, and in this case Girtin’s inventive and fluent hand is clearly apparent under Turner’s economical use of a simple monochrome palette.

1794 - 1797

Rome: The Ruins of Tiberius’ Villa on the Palatine Hill, with the Wall of the Farnese Gardens

TG0532

by Greg Smith

Place depicted

Footnotes

  1. 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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