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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1787-1801 Student and master > Architectural and Other Subjects c.1797 ... > Fonthill Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Basel: The City seen from the Rhine 1802

Image 1 of 2
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Basel: The City seen from the Rhine’ 1802
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Basel: The City seen from the Rhine 1802
D02231
Turner Bequest XLVII 54
Pencil on white wove paper, 332 x 469 mm
Watermark ‘J Whatman 1794’
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram bottom right
Stamped in black ‘XLVII 54’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This careful drawing of the buildings of Basel as seen from the river was used for an engraved subject in the Liber Studiorum series, published in 1807 in its Architectural category (Tate impressions: A00919, A00920). It may never have passed through the stage of being a drawing in brown wash like the majority of the designs, though in 1878 the Turner scholar W.G. Rawlinson noted a drawing ‘sold some years ago by Mr Halsted’.1 The subject is represented in the Turner Bequest by an etched outline worked up in watercolour, presumably by Turner (Tate D08110; Turner Bequest CXVI I).
1
W[illiam] G[eorge] Rawlinson, Turner’s Liber Studiorum, A Description and a Catalogue, London 1878, p.15.
Technical notes:
For a proposed sequence for the leaves of the disbound Fonthill sketchbook, with this page as folio 37, see the Introduction.
Verso:
Blank

Andrew Wilton
March 2013

How to cite

Andrew Wilton, ‘Basel: The City seen from the Rhine 1802 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, March 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, April 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-basel-the-city-seen-from-the-rhine-r1174255, accessed 20 April 2024.