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 > Cochem to Coblenz - Home Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Karden, with St Castor's Church and the Burghaus, Looking Downstream 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Karden, with St Castor's Church and the Burghaus, Looking Downstream’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 10 Verso:
Karden, with St Castor’s Church and the Burghaus, Looking Downstream 1839
D28556
Turner Bequest CCXCI 10 a
Pencil on cream laid writing paper, 100 x 156 mm
Watermarked with French imperial eagle
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ‘Carden’ far left
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Here Turner shows Karden, a town celebrated for ‘the number and beauty of its old religious edifices’, as the author Michael Joseph Quin writes.1 At the centre of the view is:
the very remarkable church of St Castor, with its three lofty belfries, which, added to the high gables and lengthened roofs in the Romanesque style of architecture, tend to give it a peculiar and most interesting appearance. This church was erected in the twelfth century, when the body of the saint (subsequently transferred to Coblenz) was buried in it.2
Beneath St Castor is the Burghaus, a ‘singular castellated building, with projecting towers... probably intended to be the palace of some “baron bold”’.3 Both landmarks are featured in an evocative and vivid gouache drawing of Karden executed on blue paper (Tate D24709; Turner Bequest CCLIX 144).

Alice Rylance-Watson
August 2013

1
Michael Joseph Quin, Steam voyages on the Seine, the Moselle, & the Rhine, London 1843, p.51
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid., p.53

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Karden, with St Castor’s Church and the Burghaus, Looking Downstream 1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 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-with-st-castors-church-and-the-burghaus-looking-r1150840, accessed 25 April 2024.