Joseph Mallord William Turner

With the page turned horizontally, the main view is north-east across the River Mur to the Schlossberg, with the Uhrturm clocktower on the right. Above appears to be a two-stage detail of the tall, domed tower of the Franziskanerkirche, overlooking the river beyond the right-hand edge of the main prospect. The viewpoint is the Grieskai, leading on to the Lendkai on the left, with the arc of the suspension bridge then spanning the river in the distance,1 although the buildings and what appears to be a statue on the left are not immediately recognisable.

Compare the recto (D30082), and the recto and verso of folio 42 (D30080–D300081). At the gutter, below a faint horizontal pencil line, Turner has squeezed in another view, with the Schlossberg beyond various towers to the east.

Turner’s views of Graz are mainly concentrated between folios 41 verso and 48 recto (D30079–D30092), and were likely made in reverse of the sketchbook’s present foliated order; see under D30079 for further discussion.2 In his 1909 Inventory, in his checklist of what he called the ‘Danube and Graz’ sketchbook (dated to c.1837–40),3 Finberg had recognised folios 42 recto–45 recto (D30080–D30086) as showing the city;4 in 1930’s In Venice with Turner, he linked the book among others to a supposed 1835 tour to the city. Apart from mentioning ‘sketches on the Danube between Vienna and Lintz’, his only other comment appears slightly bemused: ‘I am not sure that he went to Graz; the sketches on pp. 42 to 45 seem to have been made from a distance.’5