As with the majority of the Italian views in Monro’s album, it has not been possible to trace the exact source of the work, though we can say with some certainty that, for once, it was not copied after a composition by John Robert Cozens (1752–97). The Ripa Grande was redeveloped at the beginning of the eighteenth century and these are the grand buildings depicted by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78) in his dramatic etching of the scene (see figure 1), which Cozens would have seen during his stay in Italy from November 1776 through to March 1779. However, as can be seen from a drawing by Isaac de Moucheron (1667–1744) from the 1690s (see figure 2), the Monro School subject depicts the old customs house of the port with steps leading down to the river Tiber, all of which was swept away by the later redevelopment. The Monro School drawing must therefore have been made after an earlier, perhaps seventeenth-century source, and it is even possible that this too was by Moucheron since Monro’s posthumous sale included five landscapes by the artist. If this was the case, it is likely that the view Girtin worked from was a partial one as the buildings in the Monro School watercolour are shown in a quiet riverside setting, completely at odds with the frenetic city centre location recorded by Piranesi and others. I suspect that Girtin’s source recorded the appearance of the buildings alone and that he improvised the river view, perhaps basing it on one of the scenes on the river Tiber sketched by Cozens.
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.
About this Work
This view of the site of the ancient port of Rome, the Ripa Grande, is mounted in an album of watercolours 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