This view of a convent in the hills above the coastal village of Vietri sul Mare 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 79). The twenty-six 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 simple outline drawing inscribed ‘The Convent of – at Vietri – Septr 24’, which is mounted in an album now at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (see the source image above). This was almost certainly traced by John Robert Cozens (1752–97) from an on-the-spot sketch he made on a second visit to Italy in 1782 (Bell and Girtin, 1935, no.272), when the artist accompanied his patron William Beckford (1760–1844) through northern Italy to Naples. The sketch is included in the third of seven sketchbooks that survive from the trip (The Whitworth, Manchester (D.1975.6.13)), and it was presumably traced by Cozens because the books were retained by Beckford. Monro’s posthumous sale, in 1833, contained only twenty or so sketches by Cozens, so the patron must have borrowed the majority of the ‘outlines or unfinished drawings’ copied by Girtin and Turner. In this case, the source of the watercolour was presumably purchased at the sale of ‘Mr COZENS’ in July 1794 by Sir George Beaumont (1753–1827).² As Kim Sloan has noted, Beaumont mounted ‘215 “tracings” or drawings on oiled paper’ in an album that he presumably lent to Monro, and it was from this collection that the two young artists produced more than fifty watercolours (Sloan and Joyner, 1993, pp.89–91). Following extensive searches, it has finally been possible to identify the large and distinctive building depicted here, and presumably Cozens had much the same problem, leaving the name of the convent blank when he inscribed his sketch. The Cantilena Convent appears again in TG0724. It is not surprising that the identity of the eighteenth-century convent proved difficult to establish since, following its closure in 1809, the building was converted to accomodate various industrial uses, most notably as a glassworks, and the original structure shown here was obscured by later extensions (Aprile and Lupo, 2015, pp737–39).³ The convent was the subject of a number of contemporary views including one by Cozens' contemporary John Warwick Smith (1749–1831).

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.1232; 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, whilst other areas, including the sky and the overhanging tree, are left unfinished. 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 it seems that either he simply ran out of time or he abandoned a composition that was not working. 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

An Unidentified Convent, near Vietri sul Mare

TG0724