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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Meuse-Mosel, Luxembourg and Northern ... > Rivers Meuse and Moselle Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Rocks at Samson 1824

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Rocks at Samson’ 1824
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 46 Recto:
Rocks at Samson 1824
D19641
Turner Bequest CCXVI 46
Pencil on white wove paper, 118 x 78 mm
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ‘Samson’ top centre, ‘Meuse’ top right towards centre, ‘Meuse’ centre towards bottom, ‘[?Ver] Rock | and B Wood’ bottom right
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘46’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CCXVI–46’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The limestone rock formations and cliffs at Samson and nearby Marche-les-Dames are the Meuse’s celebrated natural monuments. In these three studies, Turner pictures the variety ‘of lofty, abrupt and sombre-tinted rocks overhanging the bed of the river’, as Bartholomew Stritch puts it; the artist’s jagged and tremulous line suggesting their time-worn fissures and grooves.1 Other studies of Mosan geology include: Tate D19644, D19646, D20058–D20059, D20262, D24736, D28129–D28130; Turner Bequest CCXVI 47a, 48a, 259–259a, CCXXII C, CCLIX 171, CCLXXXVII 46a–47.

Alice Rylance-Watson
March 2014

1
Bartholomew Stritch, The Meuse, the Moselle, and the Rhine; or, A six weeks' tour through the finest river scenery in Europe, by B.S., London 1845, p.25.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Rocks at Samson 1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, March 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, April 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-rocks-at-samson-r1174429, accessed 26 April 2024.