Joseph Mallord William Turner

Alf, with Burg Arras in the Distance

1839

Image released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

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Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
Trèves to Cochem and Coblenz to Mayence Sketchbook
Medium
Graphite on paper
Dimensions
Support: 100 × 163 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D28373
Turner Bequest CCXC 12

Catalogue entry

This sketch depicts the town of Alf with a spired church on the right and the Burg Arras, a medieval ruined tower, in the distance.1 Villagers can be seen in the foreground, both on the banks of the river and in small rowing boats. Both the present sketch and those on folios 11 and 12 verso (Tate D28372, D28374; Turner Bequest CCXC 11a, 12a) formed the basis of a gouache, pen and ink and watercolour drawing held at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.2

Alice Rylance-Watson
July 2013

1
‘The Castle and its History’, Arras Castle, http://www.arras.de/html/castle.html, accessed 15 July 2013.
2
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.421 no.1023.

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