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

With the page turned horizontally, as identified by the Dutch Turner scholar Fred Bachrach, the main drawing shows moored barges in Rotterdam’s Blaak basin, with the shallow dome and clock-tower of the Lutheran Church and the elevating ophaalbrug-type Houtbrug to the west-south-west in the distance, towards the left turn into the Leuvehaven. At the top right is an architectural study of a part of the rusticated Beurs (stock exchange), which would have been to Turner’s right as he looked along the harbour;1 another part of the building is shown in detail on folio 70 recto (D18977). There is a complementary view in this direction among various subjects on folio 72 recto opposite (D18981), under which there is further discussion of the other features mentioned above.

Andrew Wilton has discussed various Rotterdam sketches in this book in terms of Turner’s practised and economical approach to noting detail: here, ‘a mere outline gives the silhouettes of buildings and the shape of a long line of houses on a canal, while some jottings at the bottom of the page supply enough information to fill the foreground with boats and figures.’2 Bachrach has noted a typically deft and selective ‘rudder with carved rudder-head’ in the foreground.3

Although the layout of the city’s central streets and harbours has been broadly preserved, very few buildings, notably St Lawrence’s Church (the Sint-Laurenskerk), survived destruction in May 1940, the Blaak has been filled in, and identification is based largely on earlier visual documentation; see under folio 35 recto (D18908) for other views in and around the city in this book and elsewhere.