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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Six Sketches Drawn Going Downstream away from Burgen and Burg Bischofstein and Looking Back at Them 1824

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 128 Verso:
Six Sketches Drawn Going Downstream away from Burgen and Burg Bischofstein and Looking Back at Them 1824
D19803
Turner Bequest CCXVI 126 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 118 x 78 mm
Inscribed in pencil ‘Burgen’ centre towards left
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
In this series of six sketches Turner records Burgen and Castle Bischofstein as he navigated the Moselle downstream towards Hatzenport. The artist uses hatching to shade Bischofstein’s cylindrical keep and the lower reaches of the vertiginous cliffs reaching down to the river, at centre, showing the fall of light and dark on the valley. A fisherman is depicted in the uppermost view in a similar canopied boat to those drawn on Tate D19801; Turner Bequest CCXVI 125v.
For other sketches and drawings of Burgen and the Burg Bischofstein see: Tate D19802, D28314, D28316, D28319, D28562–D28566, D28966, D29021; Turner Bequest CCXVI 126, CCLXXXIX 12a, 13a, 15, CCXCI 13a–15a, CCXCII 19, 70.
Technical notes:
The paper has browned and the pencil has faded a little: this is the likely result of the folio’s overexposure during its display at the National Gallery in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Alice Rylance-Watson
May 2014

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Six Sketches Drawn Going Downstream away from Burgen and Burg Bischofstein and Looking Back at Them 1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 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-six-sketches-drawn-going-downstream-away-from-burgen-and-r1174594, accessed 29 March 2024.