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 > Trèves to Cochem and Coblenz to Mayence ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Oberwesel and the Schönburg, Looking Upstream towards Burg Gutenfels in the Distance 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Oberwesel and the Schönburg, Looking Upstream towards Burg Gutenfels in the Distance’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 55 Recto:
Oberwesel and the Schönburg, Looking Upstream towards Burg Gutenfels in the Distance 1839
D28459
Turner Bequest CCXC 55
Pencil on flecked off-white wove paper, 100 x 163 mm
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘55’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CCXC–55’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Here Turner has recorded a prospect of Oberwesel, a town on the Rhine’s left bank situated between Sankt Goar and Bacharach. The view encompasses the Pfarrkirche Liebfrauen, the tower of Saint Martin’s Parish Church, Saint Werner’s Chapel with its onion-shaped dome, the Ochsenturm, and the numerous defensive towers connected to Oberwesel’s city walls. The Schönburg Castle, for centuries home to the dukes of that name, is atop the mount at the centre. The keep of the Burg Gutenfels (c.1220) can just be seen in the distance on the opposite bank.
This sketch and those on Tate D28460–D28465; Turner Bequest CCXC 55a–58 are the preliminary material for a highly finished watercolour and gouache drawing of 1840.1

Alice Rylance-Watson
July 2013

1
See Shanes, Joll, Warrell and others 2000, p.222 no.101 and Powell 1991, p.118 no.30, reproduced.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Oberwesel and the Schönburg, Looking Upstream towards Burg Gutenfels in the Distance 1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 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-oberwesel-and-the-schonburg-looking-upstream-towards-burg-r1150742, accessed 14 May 2024.