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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Northern Germany, the Elbe and Prague ... > Hamburg and Copenhagen Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Hamburg: View on the Ramparts 1835

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Hamburg: View on the Ramparts’ 1835
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 14 Verso:
Hamburg: View on the Ramparts 1835
D30848
Turner Bequest CCCV 14 a
Pencil on white laid writing paper, 92 x 155 mm
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ‘[...]’ centre
Partial Watermark: orb ornamented with laurel leaves
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This is a view of the city of Hamburg taken from its ramparts. The existing medieval walls were strengthened and extended in advance of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) to enclose the old town (Aldstadt) and an area to the west called the Neustadt. The ramparts, as one commentator wrote in 1807, form a rough ‘semicircle’ around the city, ‘terminating on the banks of the Elbe’.1 Here Turner draws the view from the ‘promenade...upon the ramparts’: a ‘beautiful parade...pleasantly bordered with trees, from whence a fine view of the surrounding country’ can be enjoyed.2
For more sketches of Hamburg see Tate D30842–D30860, D30862–D30870, D30872, D30874–D30880, D30882–D30886; Turner Bequest CCCV 11a–20a, 21a–25a, 26a, 27a–30a, 31a–33a.

Alice Rylance-Watson
April 2015

1
Joshua Jepson Oddy, European Commerce, Shewing New and Secure Channels of Trade with the Continent of Europe, Philadelphia 1807, p.143.
2
Ibid.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Hamburg: View on the Ramparts 1835 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 2015, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, August 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-hamburg-view-on-the-ramparts-r1187226, accessed 21 May 2024.