Joseph Mallord William Turner

Beilstein and Burg Metternich, Looking Downstream

1824

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

View by appointment
Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
Moselle (or Rhine) Sketchbook
Medium
Graphite on paper
Dimensions
Support: 160 × 235 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D20166
Turner Bequest CCXIX 5

Catalogue entry

This drawing and Tate D20167; Turner Bequest CCXIX 6 show Beilstein on the Moselle, a town nestled at the foot of a ridge atop which a ruined fortification, the Burg Metternich, stands. For the Irish author and traveller Michael Joseph Quin, the medieval structure constituted ‘altogether one of the most picturesque memorials of chivalry to be seen on the Moselle’.1 Following the slope in a downward diagonal, the eye is met by the ornate Baroque spire of St Joseph’s Parish Church, which, at the time of Turner’s visit, was also a Carmelite monastery. At top right Turner has inscribed ‘Pydelstein’, probably his interpretation of the spelling of ‘Beilstein’.
1
Michael Joseph Quin, Steam voyages on the Seine, the Moselle, & the Rhine: with railroad visits to the principal cities of Belgium, London 1843, p.36.
Verso:
Blank

Alice Rylance-Watson
November 2013

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