J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

Used vertically both ways up, this page comprises four separate drawings. The upper, separated by horizontal and vertical pencil lines, is a slight riverside scene, presumably on the Rhine in Germany given the steepness of the setting. Although difficult to confirm, the building towards the left, with tall, slender windows, is possibly the roofless shell of the Gothic Wernerkapelle at Bacharach, on the west bank north of Burg Sooneck (shown on the verso; D32652) and south of Kaub and its castles (see under folio 55 recto; D32647; CCCXXII 56). Turner had drawn Bacharach on the outward leg of the present tour, in the Brussels up to Mannheim – Rhine sketchbook (D29700, D29725, D29726, D29728; CCXCVI 54, 66a, 67, 68); the Wernerkapelle is seen twice from comparable angles in D29726.

For numerous other views of the town, see the 1817 Itinerary Rhine Tour, Waterloo and Rhine and Rhine sketchbooks (Tate; Turner Bequest CLIX, CLX, CLXI), the 1835 Prague, Nuremberg, Frankfurt and Rhine book (Tate; CCCIV), the 1839 Trèves to Cochem and Coblenz to Mayence book (Tate; CCXC) and 1840’s Würzburg, Rhine and Ostend (Tate; CCCIII). After two 1817 watercolours of distant views (currently untraced;1 British Museum, London2) and an 1820 variant (Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums),3 for which there are two colour studies (Tate D25242, D25304; Turner Bequest CCLXIII 120, 182), an 1830 watercolour vignette of the town itself, Bacharach on the Rhine (Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College),4 was engraved in 1832 for Byron’s Works (Tate impression: T06648). There are also watercolours from the early 1840s (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)5 and about 1841 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London),6 and a pencil study of about 1844 on the back of another Rhine watercolour (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin).7

Next on this page is a study of two boats, one under sail and the other with a brief zig-zag wisp of smoke from a central chimney, more suggestive of a barge’s stovepipe than a steamer’s funnel. The third drawing shows a wooded river scene with a sailing boat in the centre; from Turner’s note above the drawing, it was likely made along the Rhine. As set out in its Introduction, this sketchbook covers Turner’s homeward route from Augsburg north-westwards to Rotterdam (see under folios 1 verso and 14 recto respectively; D32543, D32568; CCCXXII 2a, 15). Travelling back down the familiar river, he worked in somewhat randomly from both ends, interspersing identifiable subjects with less distinctive renderings of towns, castles and the landscape.

At the bottom, with the page inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, is a view of Rotterdam itself with typical Dutch houses along a quay and St Lawrence’s Church (the Sint-Laurenskerk) rising above the roofs towards the left, with low canal bridges in the foreground. There is another urban scene of a similar character directly opposite, on folio 56 verso (D32650; CCCXXII 57a). Although the layout of the city’s central streets and harbours has been broadly preserved, very few buildings (notably St Lawrence’s) survived destruction in May 1940, and identification is based largely on earlier visual documentation; see under D32568 for other views in and around Rotterdam in this book and elsewhere.