Oil paint on canvas
Tate Britain
Italy
Tate Collection
Works with images
Works on display
Joseph Mallord William Turner
Turner Bequest
Oil paintings
Collection
Turner owned by Tate
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/joseph-mallord-william-turner-558" aria-label="More by Joseph Mallord William Turner" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Joseph Mallord William Turner</a>
Childe Harolds Pilgrimage  Italy
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
adults
architecture
bridge
bridges and viaducts
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’
countries and continents
eating and drinking
figure
group
groups
Italy
landscape
leisure and pastimes
literature (not Shakespeare)
literature and fiction
people
picnic
places
river
rocky
tree
water: inland
<p>This painting was so popular that visitors to the Royal Academy were advised to arrive at opening time to avoid the crowds. Art critics, however, slated Turner’s colouring. Its ‘red glow’, said one, was ‘fatiguing to the eye’. Another reminded Turner that his hero, 17th-century landscape master Claude, painted Italy in hues subtler than the ‘colours of the rainbow.’ Its title refers to a poem by the most gossiped-about poet of the day, Lord Byron. Turner showed his painting with lines from Byron’s poem: ‘...and now, fair Italy! / Thou are the garden of the world...’.</p><p><em>Gallery label, October 2023</em></p>
painting oil paint canvas
23 July 2001 – 23 June 2002
2002-06-23
23 July 2001 – 23 June 2002
2002-06-23
2001-07-23
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2001-07-23
Italy and the Classical Tradition
Collection based display
15 June 2002 – 21 May 2007
2007-05-21
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2002-06-15
Pastoral Landscape
Collection based display
6 February 2003 – 4 January 2004
2004-01-04
6 February 2003 – 11 May 2003
2003-05-11
2003-02-06
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
8 June 2003 – 7 September 2003
2003-09-07
2003-06-08
Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis, USA)
7 October 2003 – 4 January 2004
2004-01-04
2003-10-07
Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA)
http://www.metmuseum.org
2003-02-06
Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics 1820 - 1840
Exhibition
1 October 2007 – 21 September 2008
2008-09-21
1 October 2007 – 6 January 2008
2008-01-06
2007-10-01
National Gallery of Art (Washington DC, USA)
10 February 2008 – 18 May 2008
2008-05-18
2008-02-10
Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, USA)
http://www.DallasMuseumofArt.org
23 June 2008 – 21 September 2008
2008-09-21
2008-06-23
Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA)
http://www.metmuseum.org
2007-10-01
JMW Turner
Tate partnerships & programmes
1 September 2009 – 15 October 2010
2010-10-15
1 September 2009 – 15 October 2010
2010-10-15
2009-09-01
National Trust: Petworth House (Petworth, UK)
2009-09-01
Reciprocal loan for Turner and the Masters
Loan-out
2 September 2011 – 15 April 2012
2012-04-15
2 September 2011 – 15 April 2012
2012-04-15
2011-09-02
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2011-09-02
Romantics
Collection based display
14 April 2012 – 9 February 2020
2020-02-09
14 April 2012 – 9 February 2020
2020-02-09
2012-04-14
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2012-04-14
Clore Introduction: Ambition and Legacy
Collection based display
8 February 2013 – 13 April 2014
2014-04-13
8 February 2013 – 19 May 2013
2013-05-19
2013-02-08
Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide, Australia)
http://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au
4 June 2013 – 8 September 2013
2013-09-08
2013-06-04
National Gallery of Australia (Canberra, Australia)
8 October 2013 – 18 December 2013
2013-12-18
2013-10-08
Toyko Metropolitan Art Museum (Toyko, Japan)
1 January 2014 – 13 April 2014
2014-04-13
2014-01-01
Kobe City Museum (Kobe, Japan)
2013-02-08
J.M.W. Turner: Makings of a Master
Loan-out
1 September 2020 – 27 November 2022
2022-11-27
1 September 2020
2020-09-01
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2020-09-01
Clore 106
Collection based display
13 March 2023
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2023-03-13
Gallery 104
Collection based display
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage - Italy
support: 1422 × 2483 mm
frame: 1920 × 3000 × 190 mm
Accepted by the nation as part of the <a href="/search?gid=999999781" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">Turner Bequest</a> 1856
<div class="text">
<p>This painting was so popular that visitors to the Royal Academy were advised to arrive at opening time to avoid the crowds. Art critics, however, slated Turner’s colouring. Its ‘red glow’, said one, was ‘fatiguing to the eye’. Another reminded Turner that his hero, 17th-century landscape master Claude, painted Italy in hues subtler than the ‘colours of the rainbow.’ Its title refers to a poem by the most gossiped-about poet of the day, Lord Byron. Turner showed his painting with lines from Byron’s poem: ‘...and now, fair Italy! / Thou are the garden of the world...’.</p>
</div>

Display caption
2023-10-25T00:00:00
display-caption
DISPLAY_CAPTION
<p><b>342. </b>[<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-childe-harolds-pilgrimage-italy-n00516" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00516</span></a>]<b> Childe Harold's Pilgrimage—Italy</b> Exh. 1832</p>
<p>THE TATE GALLERY, LONDON (516)</p>
<p>Canvas, 56 × 97 3/4 (142 × 248)</p>
<p><b>Coll.</b> Turner Bequest 1856 (51, ‘Childe Harolds Pilgrimage’ 8'3 1/2 × 4'9"); transferred to the Tate Gallery 1914.</p>
<p><b>Exh.</b> R.A. 1832 (70); Tate Gallery 1959 (350); Edinburgh 1968 (10); Bibliotheque Nationale <i>Berlioz</i>, Paris 1969 (97); Victoria and Albert Museum <i>Berlioz</i>, 1969 (170, repr.); Victoria and Albert Museum <i>Byron</i>, 1974 (537).</p>
<p><b>Lit.</b> Ruskin 1860 and 1857 (1903–12, vii, p. 431; xiii, pp. 140–45); Thornbury 1862, i, pp. 320–21: 1877, p. 448; Hamerton 1879, pp. 257–61; Monkhouse 1879, pp. 97–8; William Sharp, <i>Life of Joseph Severn</i>, 1892, p. 171; Bell 1901, p. 58–9, 118 no. 177; Armstrong 1902, pp. 114, 220; MacColl 1920, p. 17; Whitley 1930, p. 235; Falk 1938, pp. 143–4; Davies 1946, p. 186; Finberg 1961, pp. 334–5, 337, 340, 493 no. 377; Rothenstein and Butlin 1964, pp. 12, 38, colour pl. xvi; Lindsay 1966, p. 180; Gage 1968, p. 682, repr. p. 683 fig. 50; Reynolds 1969, p. 160; Watson 1971, pp. 114–15; Topliss 1978, p. 90, pl. 4; Kitson 1983, p. 13.</p>
<p>Exhibited in 1832 with the lines:</p>
<p>‘—and now, fair Italy!
<br/>Thou art the garden of the world.
<br/>Even in thy desert what is like to thee?
<br/>Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy waste
<br/>More rich than other climes' fertility:
<br/>Thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin graced
<br/>With an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced.’</p>
<p align="right"><i>Lord Byron</i>, Canto 4.</p>
<p>The subject may have been partly influenced by the exhibition at the R.A. in 1829 of Eastlake's <i>Lord Byron's Dream</i>, painted in 1827 and now in the Tate Gallery.</p>
<p>The vase among the <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/still-life" title="Glossary definition for 'Still life'"><span>still-life</span></a> detail in the left foreground was originally stuck on as a piece of <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/paper" title="Glossary definition for 'Paper'"><span>paper</span></a> and subsequently painted over. The picture was quoted by Ruskin, in his <i>Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House</i>, as an example of the decay he saw as having occurred in many of Turner's works. ‘It <i>was</i>, once, quite the loveliest work of the second period, but is now a mere wreck. The fates by which Turner's later pictures perish are as various as they are cruel; and the greater number, whatever care be taken of them, fade into strange consumption and pallid shadowing of their former selves. Their effects were either attained by so light glazing of one colour over another, that the upper colour, in a year or two, sank entirely into its ground, and was seen no more; or else, by the stirring and kneading together of colours chemically discordant, which gathered into angry spots; or else, by laying on liquid tints with too much vehicle in them, which cracked as they dried; or solid tints, with too little vehicle in them, which dried into powder and fell off; or <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/painting" title="Glossary definition for 'Painting'"><span>painting</span></a> the whole on an ill-prepared <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/c/canvas" title="Glossary definition for 'Canvas'"><span>canvas</span></a>, from which the picture peeled like the bark from a birch-tree; or using a wrong white, which turned black; or a wrong red, which turned grey; or a wrong yellow, which turned brown. But, one way or another, all but eight or ten of his later pictures have gone to pieces, or worse than pieces—ghosts, which are supposed to be representations of their living presence. This “Childe Harold” is a ghost only. What amount of change has passed upon it may be seen by examining the bridge over the river on the right. There either was, or was intended to be, a drawbridge or wooden bridge over the gaps between the two ruined piers. But either the intention of bridge was painted over, and has penetrated again through the disappearing upper colour; or (which I rather think) the realization of bridge was once there, and is disappearing itself. Either way, the change is fatal; and there is hardly a single passage of colour throughout the cool <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/t/tone" title="Glossary definition for 'Tone'"><span>tones</span></a> of the picture which has not lost nearly as much. It would be less baneful if all the colours faded together amicably, but they are in a state of perpetual revolution; one staying as it was, and the others blackening or fading about it, and falling out with it, in irregular degrees, never more by any reparation to be reconciled. Nevertheless, even in its present state, all the <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/l/landscape" title="Glossary definition for 'Landscape'"><span>landscape</span></a> on this right hand portion of the picture is exquisitely beautiful—founded on faithful reminiscences of the defiles of Narni, and the roots of the Apennines, seen under purple evening light.’</p>
<p>The picture attracted considerable public attention, so much so that the <i>Spectator</i> for 12 May 1832 advised people to get to the <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/a/academy" title="Glossary definition for 'Academy'"><span>Academy</span></a> when it opened at eight and emulate the reviewer who had ‘sated our senses with its luxuriant richness ... Let the reader first go close up ... and look at the way in which it is painted; and then, turning his back (as one does sometimes to the sun) till he reaches the middle of the room, look round at the streaky, scrambled, unintelligible chaos of colour, and see what a scene has been conjured up before him as if by magic ... Then he will see that this is no meretricious trick of art—no mad freak of genius—no mere exaggeration of splendour—no outrage of propriety—but an imaginative vision of nature seen by the waking mind of genius, and transferred to canvas by the consummate skill of a master-hand. He will feel that it is the poetry of art and of nature combined—that it bears the same relation to the real scene as does Byron's description.’ Other critics were equally full of praise. For the <i>Athenaeum</i>, 12 May, ‘This is one of the noblest landscapes of our gifted artist; it has all the poetry of his best pictures, with all the true colouring of his less imaginative compositions.’</p>
<p>However, elsewhere there was some criticism of Turner's colours, of ‘a constant recurrence of a laky red glow ... fatiguing to the eye’ (<i>Morning Herald</i>, 7 May), or ‘a blaze of king's-yellow and chrome’ with which ‘the sky is cold in comparison’ and which ‘does not harmonize with the scene below’ (<i>Library of the Fine Arts</i>, June 1832). For the <i>Examiner</i>, 1 July, the picture ‘has little to recommend it as a <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/c/composition" title="Glossary definition for 'Composition'"><span>composition</span></a>. Its colouring is gorgeous, but monotonous’. The <i>Morning Post</i> for 29 May said of the picture that ‘it is more gorgeous than true ... In all the requisites of <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/f/form" title="Glossary definition for 'Form'"><span>form</span></a> in the <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/perspective" title="Glossary definition for 'Perspective'"><span>perspective</span></a>, grouping, and disposition of the various portions of this varied scene, all the mastery of art is displayed; but in the essential of colour ... dame Nature never wore so meretricious a robe ... Fortunately we have a few Claudes in the Galleries of this country to instruct our untravelled eyes in the true features and hues of the classic land, or we might be borne down by the authoritative assertion of certain pilgrims of art, who would persuade us that there are no colours beyond the Alps but the colours of the rainbow.’ Similarly, the <i>Literary Gazette</i> for 12 May wrote: ‘We look upon this beautiful, but exceedingly artificial picture, as a vision, and cannot for a single instant believe in its reality.’</p>
<p>Finally, for the <i>Morning Chronicle</i>, 7 May, Turner ‘is a sort of Paganini, and performs wonders on a single string—is as astonishing with his chrome, as Paganini is with his chromatics ... But even now, with all his antics, he stands alone in all the higher qualities of landscape painting.’</p>
<p>Richard Westmacott, writing to Joseph Severn in June 1832 about that year's Royal Academy exhibition, exclaimed, ‘Turner is splendid, and excepting in one picture, “The Burning Fiery Furnace!” [No. 346 [<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-shadrach-meshach-and-abednego-in-the-burning-fiery-furnace-n00517" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00517</span></a>]], charming and intelligible. His “Italy” is the most magnificent piece of landscape poetry that was ever conceived. It is like nothing but itself, so I cannot compare it with Claude or any other painter, to help your notion of it.’</p>
<p><b>Published in:</b>
<br/>Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, <i>The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner</i>, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984
<br/></p>

Catalogue entry
2004-09-22T00:00:00
catalogue-entry
CATALOGUE_ENTRY
adults architecture bridge bridges and viaducts Byron, George Gordon, Lord, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ countries and continents eating and drinking figure group groups Italy landscape leisure and pastimes literature and fiction literature (not Shakespeare) people picnic places river rocky tree water: inland