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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > The Second Meuse-Moselle Tour 1839 > Trèves to Cochem and Coblenz to Mayence ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Boppard, Looking Downstream; Distant View of the Marxburg 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Boppard, Looking Downstream; Distant View of the Marxburg’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 83 Verso:
Boppard, Looking Downstream; Distant View of the Marxburg 1839
D28516
Turner Bequest CCXC 82 b
Pencil on flecked off-white wove paper, 100 x 163 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The landscape running parallel to the gutter of the sketchbook shows the historic town of Boppard in the Rhine Gorge. The twin-towered Saint Severus’s Church is the most conspicuous of Boppard’s landmarks pictured here, with the medieval Electoral Castle (Alte Brug) and Kloster Marienberg beyond.
Drawn inversely to the sketch of Boppard is a slight and swiftly rendered view of the Marxburg at Brubach. The castle was constructed in the twelfth century by the powerful noble family of Eppstein and was later purchased by the Count of Katzenelnbogen who built the Gothic part of the Marksburg.1 For other sketches of the Marxburg in this book see Tate D28520–D28523; Turner Bequest CCXC 83–84a. For earlier representations see the Waterloo and Rhine and Rhine sketchbooks of 1817 (Tate D12801, D12851, D12913, D12974; CLX 52, 77, CLXI 19, 49). See also two highly finished watercolours of the Marxburg produced in 1817 (Indianapolis Museum of Art) and 1820 (British Museum, London).2
1
‘History’, The Marksburg, http://www.marksburg.de/english/frame.htm, accessed 31 July 2013.
2
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.376 no.653 and p.p.380 no.692 respectively.
Technical notes:
The following folios 84 recto to 86 verso (Tate D28516–D28520; Turner Bequest CCXC 82c, 82d) are blanks.1

Alice Rylance-Watson
July 2013

1
A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.II, p.927; 82c, as ‘Braubach (?)’ and 82d, as ‘Town, with church’

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Boppard, Looking Downstream; Distant View of the Marxburg 1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 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-boppard-looking-downstream-distant-view-of-the-marxburg-r1150799, accessed 26 April 2024.