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

With the page turned horizontally, the view is south along the west bank of the River Rhine at Cologne towards the spire and pinnacles of the Great St Martin church. The defensive Rheinmauer walls below it were demolished later in the nineteenth century; the section towards St Martin’s is marked on maps of the time as the Bollwerk, with a large, turreted bastion on a shallow half-hexagon plan jutting out into the river on the near side of the church, as seen at the centre. Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll described the adjacent rusticated Baroque gateway as at ‘the entrance to the Zollstrasse’,1 no longer extant but noted in old guidebooks as leading west to the Alter Markt.

Butlin and Joll’s note was in relation to Turner’s large oil painting Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet Boat. Evening, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1826 (Frick Collection, New York).2 The present sketch must surely have informed the painting, where these elements are seen from the same angle to the right of centre; possibly it has escaped previous notice in that context owing to Finberg’s laconic title: ‘Buildings’.3 There are other sources from this tour and the artist’s 1817 visit (which had resulted in a watercolour of the same scene), as fully discussed under folio 143 recto (D19122). Another element in common with the painting is the gangplank leading down from the loosely rendered boat or boats on the left.

Despite nineteenth-century redevelopment, substantial damage during the Second World War and later bridges, some features of Cologne’s main river prospects, including St Martin’s, remain recognisable, but this one is otherwise totally changed. The walls and gate survived long enough, with further renovations and alterations, to be the subject of a stereoscopic photograph by William England from a similar viewpoint, Tour de l’Eglise St. Martin à Cologne, from an 1867–8 series of Views of the Rhine and its Vicinity / Der Rhein und seine Umgebungen.4 The sketch on the verso (D19135) is likely from around the far side of the bastion. See under folio 141 recto (D19118) for discussion of Turner’s views of the city in 1825 and on other occasions.5