Joseph Mallord William Turner

The Burg at Cochem; Cochem, Looking Upstream; Clouds over a River Valley

1839

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

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Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
First Mossel and Oxford Sketchbook
Medium
Graphite on paper
Dimensions
Support: 235 × 140 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D28318
Turner Bequest CCLXXXIX 14 a

Catalogue entry

Here Turner has made two sketches of the town of Cochem, rendered in fine, agile line and orientated inversely to one another. The ruins of the medieval Castle Reichsburg are recorded from close up and from a distance. The castle was first mentioned in a document of 1051 and was for many years the established seat of the palatinate counts until the first German King Konrad III declared it an imperial castle.1 It fell into ruin after an occupation by the French King Louis XIV over the course of the Nine Years War and remained in a decaying state until 1868 when it was rebuilt in the Gothic revival architectural style.2
Below is a roughly wrought jotting of the Moselle valley, with low-lying rolling hills and puffy clouds above.

Alice Rylance-Watson
August 2013

1
‘History of Cochem Castle’, Reichsburg, Cochem, http://www.burg-cochem.de/english/history.htm, accessed 11 July 2013.
2
Ibid.

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