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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > The Second Meuse-Moselle Tour 1839 > Meuse-Moselle Gouache and Watercolour ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Karden from the North c.1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Karden from the North’ c.1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Karden from the North c.1839
D24709
Turner Bequest CCLIX 144
Gouache and watercolour on blue wove paper, 139 x 193 mm
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCLIX–144’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This impressionistic scene shows the town of Karden on the Moselle. Michael Joseph Quin writes that no other settlement on this river ‘is more celebrated for the number and beauty of its old religious edifices’, the largest of these being the Romanesque Basilica of St Castor.1 With hairline strokes of ink, Turner delineates the contours of this ancient structure, leaving the body of the building unpainted and the blue paper exposed. It appears almost ghosted, looming over the local houses and buildings which are left rather diminutive in comparison.
St Castor, Quin remarks, has a ‘peculiar and most interesting appearance’ owing to ‘its three lofty belfries’, ‘high gabls [sic] and lengthened roofs’.2 By 1839 the basilica also housed ‘a female convent’ and several ‘small oratories’ which were ‘all stations for pilgrimages’.3 In front of the basilica and on the banks of the river is the Burghaus, a turreted and ‘castellated’ sixteenth-century house with multiple projecting towers’ which Quin writes was ‘probably intended to be the palace of some “baron bold”.’4
This gouache is based on the preliminary pencil sketch Tate D28558; Turner Bequest CCXCI 11a.
1
Michael Joseph Quin, Steam voyages on the Seine, the Moselle, & the Rhine: with railroad visits to the principal cities of Belgium, London 1843, p.51.
2
Ibid, p.51–2.
3
Ibid, p.52.
4
Ibid, p.53.
Verso:
Inscribed in pencil ‘CCLIX 144’ at bottom right.

Alice Rylance-Watson
September 2013

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Karden from the North c.1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-karden-from-the-north-r1150995, accessed 24 May 2025.