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

With the page turned horizontally, various boats are shown moored off low buildings. As on adjacent pages, the setting is presumably the west bank of the River Rhine at Cologne, with part of the lost Rheinmauer defensive wall. Cecilia Powell has linked the present sketch to the large oil painting Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet Boat. Evening, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1826 (Frick Collection, New York),1 observing that it was ‘based – both in its general plan and some of its specific details – upon recent sketches of that city’ in this book.2 The painting is discussed under folio 143 recto opposite (D19122); see also folio 164 verso (D19165).

Large barges are shown here at the centre and towards the right, prefiguring those in the painting. One appears to bear the word ‘Dort’, a variant of Dordrecht, a city Turner had explored at length during the earlier Dutch phase of this tour (see under folio 47 recto; D18931); this may be the craft’s name, or indicate that it was registered there or plied a route along the Rhine and its distributaries. As Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll have noted, the painting’s principal ‘packet boat has “AMITIE” on its stern and “KOLEN DUSSELDORF UND RETOUR” (a characteristic Turnerian amalgam of language).’3 The large serrated rudder in this sketch has a more direct equivalent in the painting, which also includes several shallow rowing boats of the sort shown here, drawn up on the bank near the passenger boat. See also the study of barges on folio 147 verso (D19131).

The most unusual element in the sketch is the fishing boat with a pivoting boom supporting the frame of a claw-like lever or lift net; see under folio 80 verso (D18998) for others depicted in this sketchbook in the course of the tour. In the painting, two such frames are shown detached and half-submerged in the foreground. The Turner scholar James Hamilton has implied that this ‘curious iron riparian paraphernalia, ... for digging [sic], fishing or lifting; tenacious, obstinate, practical, honest forks’, represent a symbolic pun on the name of Turner’s great friend and patron Walter Fawkes,4 who owned Dort, or Dordrecht, the Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed, exhibited at the Academy in 1818 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven),5 a major painting on a similar scale and theme to the 1826 work. Turner had dined with Fawkes, who was in failing health, on the eve of the present tour (see the sketchbook’s Introduction), and his friend died a few weeks later, so this aspect of Cologne may have been a tribute of sorts, albeit allusive and obscure; the word ‘Dort’ on the hull here would certainly have had resonances for the artist in that context.

Despite nineteenth-century redevelopment, substantial damage during the Second World War and later bridges, features of Cologne’s main river prospects remain recognisable. See under folio 141 recto (D19118) for discussion of views of the city from this tour and other occasions,6 and the sketchbook’s Introduction for discussion of its many shipping studies.

The opposite page (D19122) was recorded as an exhibit in 1980’s J.M. William Turner: Köln und der Rhein exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne; the present sketch would necessarily have been on display facing it, although it was not listed.7