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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner The West Choir and Towers of Trier Cathedral and the Adjacent Liebfrauenkirche 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 47 Verso:
The West Choir and Towers of Trier Cathedral and the Adjacent Liebfrauenkirche 1839
D28252
Turner Bequest CCLXXXVIII 47 a
Pencil on cream laid writing paper, 168 x 101 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This sketch is orientated inversely relative to the foliation and continues onto the folio opposite (Tate D28253; Turner Bequest CCLXXXVIII 48). It depicts the west choir and towers of the Cathedral of St Peter (Trier Dom) and the Liebfrauenkirche (Church of our Lady). St Peter’s was raised on Roman foundations, following the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. After extensive damage in the sixth and tenth centuries the surviving part of the cathedral was enlarged in the Romanesque style in 1035.1 The Liebfrauenkirche, meanwhile, situated next to the cathedral, was constructed in the 1230s over a section of a Roman double church by masons from the Champagne region of France.2
Turner employs bold, angular line to render the structures of the two buildings: handling which seems to describe the cathedral particularly well, given its rather fortress-like exterior.

Alice Rylance-Watson
May 2013

2
‘Pfarrkirche Leibfrauen-Basilika’, Liebfrauen Trier, accessed May 2013, http://www.liebfrauen-trier.de/pfarrkirche%20liebfrauen.htm

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘The West Choir and Towers of Trier Cathedral and the Adjacent Liebfrauenkirche 1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-west-choir-and-towers-of-trier-cathedral-and-the-r1150529, accessed 19 September 2024.