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 > Cochem to Coblenz - Home Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Three Sketches of the Monument to General Hoche at Weissenthurm; Weissenthurm and Neuwied with the Flying Bridge, Looking down the Rhine 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Three Sketches of the Monument to General Hoche at Weissenthurm; Weissenthurm and Neuwied with the Flying Bridge, Looking down the Rhine’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 38 Recto:
Three Sketches of the Monument to General Hoche at Weissenthurm; Weissenthurm and Neuwied with the Flying Bridge, Looking down the Rhine 1839
D28610
Turner Bequest CCXCI 38
Pencil on cream laid writing paper, 100 x 156 mm
Watermarked ‘v d m[eulen]’
Inscribed in red ink by Ruskin ‘38’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCXCI–38’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This slight landscape sketch shows the village of Weißenthurm, situated on the left bank of the Rhine opposite Neuweid, approximately twelve kilometres north-west of Koblenz. The tall tower at left, called the White Tower, signals Weißenthurm’s location and is the origin of the town’s name. The flying bridge over the Rhine, marked out by a short line of dashes, connects the town to Neuweid and is where ‘the steamers stop... to receive or let out passengers’, according to John Murray’s Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent.1
Weißenthurmn is also home to a memorial to the French Revolutionary General Louis Lazare Hoche (1768–1797), seen here at left and in a series of three jottings above the landscape. In April 1797 Hoche led a surprise attack against Franz von Werneck’s Austrian Army during the War of the First Coalition (1792–7). To mark his success in defeating the Austrians, an obelisk was erected in his honour and inscribed: ‘L’Armée de Sambre et Meuse à son Général Hoche’.2 Weißenthurmn was already synonymous with military triumph as Murray writes that ‘seventeen centuries before’ the Roman emperor Caesar had also ‘crossed the Rhine at the same spot’ when he led his army ‘against the Sicambri’. 3
Weißenthurmn and the monument to Hoche is pictured by Turner in the 1817 Rhine sketchbook (Tate D12950; Turner Bequest CLXI 36a) and in a highly finished watercolour of the same date (Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio).4

Alice Rylance-Watson
August 2013

1
John Murray, A Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent: Being a Guide Through Holland, Belgium, Prussia, and Northern Germany, and Along the Rhine, from Holland to Switzerland, London 1838, p.243.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
4
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.376 no.660.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Three Sketches of the Monument to General Hoche at Weissenthurm; Weissenthurm and Neuwied with the Flying Bridge, Looking down the Rhine 1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 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-three-sketches-of-the-monument-to-general-hoche-at-r1150894, accessed 23 April 2024.