Joseph Mallord William Turner

Givet and Fort Charlemont, Looking Upstream from North of the Town

1824

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

View by appointment
Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
Huy and Dinant Sketchbook
Medium
Graphite on paper
Dimensions
Support: 99 × 162 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D20114
Turner Bequest CCXVII 20

Catalogue entry

This drawing is part of a panoramic prospect of Givet, which extends onto the folio opposite (Tate D41009). On this page Turner shows the Fort Charlemont, a fortress constructed in 1555 to defend the Meuse valley. At the end of the seventeenth century the Fort was strengthened by Louis XIV’s chief military engineer Vauban and centuries later, it would come to play a key role in the Napoleonic Wars.1
The Fort Charlemont is recorded in Turner’s 1824 Rivers Meuse and Moselle sketchbook (Tate D19664–D19671; Turner Bequest CCXVI 57a–61) and in a later sketchbook of 1839 (Tate D28170–D28185, D28187; Turner Bequest CCLXXXVIII 2a–10, 11

Alice Rylance-Watson
January 2014

1
For more information on the Fort Charlemont see ‘Givet’, Fortified Places, accessed 23 January 2014, http://www.fortified-places.com/givet

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