Joseph Mallord William Turner

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.