Catalogue entry
The drawing was made with the page turned horizontally. Finberg later correctly annotated his generic 1909
Inventory entry (‘Do. [i.e. ditto: Landscape, with church], &c.’): ‘Mechlin’.
1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy in the same way.
2 This was the traditional English spelling of Mechelen (in Dutch, ‘Malines’ in French), a Flemish city north of Brussels and south of Antwerp, and one of the last stops on the 1840 tour (see the sketchbook’s Introduction).
The slight view here includes the upper stages of the ninety-seven metre (320 foot) tower of St Rumbold’s Cathedral, with its truncated spire, soaring over various gabled and turreted buildings typical of the city. There is a view showing more of the cathedral on the verso (
D30465); the Mechelen sketches and a few others fall within a sequence of coastal views at Ostend, roughly seventy miles to the west, which marked the end of Turner’s long Continental itinerary; see under folio 1 recto (
D30460).
3There is a distant view of the tower, labelled ‘Malines’, in the 1817
Dort sketchbook (Tate
D12997; Turner Bequest CLXII 1a).
For discussion of the watermark, see the overall technical notes in the sketchbook’s introduction.
1
Matthew Imms
September 2018
Read full Catalogue entry
