Joseph Mallord William Turner, RA and Thomas Girtin

The present watercolor dates to circa 1797 and shows a view from the Medici’s Boboli Gardens, which lie above the Pitti Palace at Florence, on the south banks of the Arno. It was almost certainly painted not in Florence, but at 8 Adelphi Terrace, the London home of Dr Thomas Monro (1759-1833), a leading physician who was also an enthusiastic amateur artist, and it derives from a drawing by John Robert Cozens, made during his second Grand Tour to Italy in 1782-1783.¹

During the winter evenings of the middle 1790s (1794-1797), Monro famously opened his doors to up and coming artists, giving them supper, providing them with a place to meet and socialize as well as permitting them to make copies from his extensive collections. Artists would work by candlelight at double-sided drawing desks and by December 1794 the Royal Academician and diarist Joseph Farington (1747-1821) described the house as being ‘like an Academy’.

Amongst the regular attendees were Joseph Mallord William Turner and Thomas Girtin. Direct contemporaries and friends they, according to Farington, would often work together with Girtin drawing in ‘the outlines’ and Turner ‘washing in the effects’.²

The present work contains only a small amount of under-drawing by Girtin, but the treatment of the building in the center is characteristic of his pencil. Turner has brought the scene to life with a highly developed use of watercolor. Greg Smith has suggested that the work fits neatly in with other fully worked up views of Florence and its adjacent territory by Turner and Girtin that they painted for Monro towards the end of their time at his 'Academy'.²

This watercolor has a long and distinguished history. At Monro's sale it was quite possibly acquired by Samuel Rogers, the banker and poet, who was at the epicenter of London's artistic and literary community and for whom Turner would paint watercolors in the 1820s. A later owner was Charles Sackville Bale, a brilliant connoisseur who formed one of the greatest and most important collections of the 19^th century. His executor's sale at Christie's in 1881 contained superb European and British drawings, porcelain, medals, gems, miniatures and sculpture and took a whole calendar month to complete.

Until recently the present work has only been known to scholars via black and white photographs, so its re-emergence today, after nearly fifty years in a private collection, is a noteworthy event. 

We are grateful to Greg Smith for his help when cataloguing this lot. 

1. The Whitworth, University of Manchester, acc. inv. 1975.6. Cozens also made a tracing of this sketchbook page. That drawing is now held at Yale’s Center for British Art, New Haven and may have been the work seen by Turner and Girtin.

2. G. Smith, lit.op.cit, online edition, TG0750; TG0753; TG0672; TG0747; TG0752; TG0752a; TG1463; TG0673.