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 Sankt Goar, Burg Rheinfels, Sankt Goarshausen and Burg Katz, Looking Downstream 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Sankt Goar, Burg Rheinfels, Sankt Goarshausen and Burg Katz, Looking Downstream’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 78 Verso:
Sankt Goar, Burg Rheinfels, Sankt Goarshausen and Burg Katz, Looking Downstream 1839
D28506
Turner Bequest CCXC 78 a
Pencil on flecked off-white wove paper, 100 x 163 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This slight sketch is a prospect of the sister towns of Sankt Goar and Sankt Goarshausen which lie on opposite banks of the Rhine to each other. The spire of the evangelical collegiate church at Sankt Goar can be seen at left. Both towns are presided over by Burg Rheinfels and Burg Katz respectively. The castles were built by the Counts of Katzenelnbogen to protect their territories, the Rheinfels slightly earlier than the Katz in 1245, on the site of an older fortification.1
Rheinfels and Katz are depicted elsewhere in this sketchbook on Tate D28455–D28457, D28507, D28509, D28510; Turner Bequest CCXC 53–54, 79a, 79c, 79d. Turner recorded the castle extensively in the Rhine sketchbook of 1817 (Tate D12918–D12923, D12930–D12932, D12935–D12937, D12952–D19260; Turner Bequest CLXI 21a–24, 26–27a, 29–30, 37a–42). See also the 1841 colour sketch (private collection).2

Alice Rylance-Watson
July 2013

1
‘History of the Castle’, St Goar, http://www.st-goar.de/734-1-geschichte-burg-rheinfels-1.html, accessed 23 July 2013.
2
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.459 no.1327.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Sankt Goar, Burg Rheinfels, Sankt Goarshausen and Burg Katz, Looking Downstream 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-sankt-goar-burg-rheinfels-sankt-goarshausen-and-burg-katz-r1150789, accessed 18 April 2024.