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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Southern Germany, Austria and Venice ... > Brussels up to Mannheim - Rhine ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Liège: The Market Square, with the Dome of St Andrew's Church, Perron Fountain and Town Hall; Detail of Fountain 1833

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Liège: The Market Square, with the Dome of St Andrew's Church, Perron Fountain and Town Hall; Detail of Fountain’ 1833
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 40 Verso:
Liège: The Market Square, with the Dome of St Andrew's Church, Perron Fountain and Town Hall; Detail of Fountain 1833
D29673
Turner Bequest CCXCVI 39a
Pencil on cream wove paper, 113 x 185 mm
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘51’ bottom left (inversely)
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The place du Marché at Liège is pictured with the Perron Fountain and the Town Hall. The dome of St Andrew’s Church can be seen in the background.
Perrons are stone columns, usually topped with an orb and cross and erected in cities belonging to the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. They often marked the place where laws were proclaimed, and functioned as public monuments symbolising autonomous governance and the Freedom of the City. Liège’s Perron was dismantled during the Wars of Liège (1465–8): a series of rebellions by the Prince-Bishopric against the Duchy of Burgundy. When rebellious Liège was captured by Charles the Bold of Burgundy, its Perron was removed to Bruges to remind its citizens to comply. It was replaced after the death of Charles the Bold and turned into a fountain.1 See also Tate D29669–D29670; Turner Bequest CCXCVI 37a–38.

Alice Rylance-Watson
February 2017

1
Marc Boone, ‘Urban Space and Political Conflict in Late Medieval Flanders’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32 (4), pp. 621–40.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Liège: The Market Square, with the Dome of St Andrew's Church, Perron Fountain and Town Hall; Detail of Fountain 1833 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, February 2017, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, March 2023, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-liege-the-market-square-with-the-dome-of-st-andrews-church-r1202971, accessed 05 June 2026.