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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Meuse-Mosel, Luxembourg and Northern ... > Rivers Meuse and Moselle Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Landshut; Half-Timbered Houses at Bernkastel; The Flying Bridge at Bernkastel 1824

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Landshut; Half-Timbered Houses at Bernkastel; The Flying Bridge at Bernkastel’ 1824
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 106 Recto:
The Landshut; Half-Timbered Houses at Bernkastel; The Flying Bridge at Bernkastel 1824
D19758
Turner Bequest CCXVI 105
Pencil on white wove paper, 118 x 78 mm
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘105’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CCXVI–105’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Here Turner portrays the hollowed and weathered remains of the Burg Landshut, a castle constructed in 1277 by Archbishop Heinrich von Vinstingen which was destroyed by a great fire in 1692.1 The castle is pictured here from the Moselle, looming over Bernkastel from atop a precipitous cliff. Boats and river barges such as those sketched on the folio opposite (Tate D19757; Turner Bequest CCXVI 104a) can be seen navigating by the town, their lofty masts rendered in long vertical strokes of the pencil. Below this drawing are two views of Bernkastel: at left Turner records the town’s half-timbered houses crammed together on a narrow street; at right, and orientated horizontally, the artist depicts the flying bridge.
For further drawings of Bernkastel and the Burg Landshut see D19759–D19760, D20176–D20182, D28312–D28313, D28406–D28412; Turner Bequest CCXVI 105a–106, CCXIX 15–21, CCLXXXIX 11a–12, CCXC 28a–31a. See also the highly finished watercolour of Bernkastel on the Mosel (c.1830), developed from Turner’s 1824 sketches of this town and its castle.2

Alice Rylance-Watson
April 2014

1
‘Ruins of Landshut Castle’, Ferienland Bernkastel-Kues, accessed 30 April 2014, http://en.bernkastel.de/holiday-region/bernkastel-kues/what-to-see/ruins-of-landshut-castle-burg-landshut-express-landshut-castle-express.html
2
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.465 no.1378; reproduced in colour in Powell 1995, p.108.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘The Landshut; Half-Timbered Houses at Bernkastel; The Flying Bridge at Bernkastel 1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 2014, 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-the-landshut-half-timbered-houses-at-bernkastel-the-flying-r1174549, accessed 24 April 2024.