LOS ANGELES, CA.- The J. Paul Getty Museum announces that J.M.W. Turner's masterpiece Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino (1838-39) is on view at the Getty Center. The recently acquired painting shows a view of Rome from the Capitoline Hill, as if looking from high in the air down upon the Campo Vaccino in the center of Old Rome, revealing the noble ruins surrounding the ancient forum and a number of still-active Baroque churches. In the foreground appears a group of women, children, and goats, in picturesque contrast to the religious procession in front of the church of Santi Luca e Martina in the near distance below.

Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino joins three other works by Turner already in the Getty Museum's collection. One of Turner's most important historical paintings, Van Tromp, Going about to Please his Masters, Ships a Sea, Getting a Good Wetting, from 1844, was acquired by the Museum in 1993, and is currently on view in the West Pavilion. The Museum also owns two watercolors by the artist: Conway Castle, North Wales, about 1800 (acquired in 1995) and Long Ships Lighthouse, Land's End, about 1835 (acquired in 1988).

In addition to the Getty's holdings, Turner is represented in the Los Angeles area by two paintings at The Huntington: the large and magisterial The Grand Canal: Scene - A Street in Venice from around 1837 and the smaller Neapolitan Fisher Girls, Surprised, Bathing by Moonlight, circa 1840. The Huntington also owns nearly 100 drawings and watercolors by the artist. Turner's very earliest period is represented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with Lake of Geneva from Montreux, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1810. With the addition of Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino, Los Angeles now has the largest concentration of works by Turner in America outside the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Equally important, the collection of Turners in Los Angeles museums now ranges from his early to late work and encompasses all of his various modes of landscape painting, from topographic record to historical and literary invention.