The Loretto Necklace

Over the winter of 1828 into 1829 Turner was in Rome, and when he set off home his finished canvases followed by sea. Worried they would not reach London in time for the Royal Academy's summer show, he improvised a whole new picture from a pencil sketch he had made of Loreto, a hill town near the Adriatic where he had stopped on the way back. It hung at the Academy that year beside his Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus. The strange title points to the string of small figures looping across the foreground, read at the time as a rosary, a nod to Loreto's famous shrine of the Madonna. Turner never sold it, and it passed to the nation with the rest of his studio in 1856.