J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

Despite Turner’s inscribing this sketch ‘Bauvill up [to] Dinant’, it is likely, as Alexander Finberg notes, that the artist was actually referring to the town of Bouvignes-sur-Meuse, a few kilometres downstream from Dinant.1

With the sketchbook turned horizontally Turner has drawn a profile of the town of Dinant nestled in the Meuse valley from upstream near Bouvignes. Dinant is identifiable by the onion-shaped dome and lantern of the Collegiate Church of Notre-Dame, diminutive in the distance on the left. The ruins of the medieval Castle of Crèvecoeur at Bouvignes is to the right of Dinant in the foreground and extends onto folio 8 verso opposite (Tate D28057; Turner Bequest CCLXXXVII 8 a). There is a gouache and watercolour drawing of a similar prospect taken from a closer perspective at sunset (Tate D20228; Turner Bequest CCXX U). For other views of Dinant and neighbouring Bouvignes in this sketchbook see Tate D28094, D28138–D28139, D28158, D28161; Turner Bequest CCLXXXVII 27a, 51, 51a, 62a, 64; see also the verso of folio 52 in the earlier Rivers Meuse and Moselle sketchbook of 1824 (Tate D19654; Turner Bequest CCXVI 52a).

Below the sketch of Dinant, on the central register, is a view of what Cecilia Powell identifies as Louvain. Though the handling is rough, Turner appears to have suggested the outline of the spire of the Church of St Quentin on the left and the Gothic Town Hall and the Church of St Peter towards the right.

The last sketch, a detail of a fort, has been taken with the sketchbook inverted relative to the foliation. Turner depicts a citadel high on a rocky promontory, perhaps the fortress at Dinant which crowns the monolith Roche à Bayard.