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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Venice, Austria and Southern Germany ... > Trieste, Graz and Danube Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner St Michael's Church and the Winterreitschule, Vienna, from the Michaelerplatz; a Detail of an Arcade; an Arcaded Interior; ?Altenberg, Sankt Andrä-Wördern, by the River Danube; a Hill and Church 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘St Michael's Church and the Winterreitschule, Vienna, from the Michaelerplatz; a Detail of an Arcade; an Arcaded Interior; ?Altenberg, Sankt Andrä-Wördern, by the River Danube; a Hill and Church’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 6 Verso:
St Michael’s Church and the Winterreitschule, Vienna, from the Michaelerplatz; a Detail of an Arcade; an Arcaded Interior; ?Altenberg, Sankt Andrä-Wördern, by the River Danube; a Hill and Church 1840
D30013
Turner Bequest CCXCIX 6a
Pencil on cream wove paper, 198 x 127 mm
Partial watermark ‘atman’
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Altenburgh | [?Cloister]’ bottom centre, upside down
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The miscellaneous drawings here were made with the vertical page turned both ways up. As identified by Cecilia Powell,1 the upper view is across Vienna’s Michaelerplatz, south past the façade and tower of St Michael’s Church on the left down Reitschulgasse, with the domed Baroque winter riding school opposite and the former Burgtheater with its rounded pediment below to the right, later demolished to make way for the concave eastern end of the St Michael’s wing of the Hofburg Palace, mirroring the riding school.
Above and below are rapid sketches of what seems to be a concave arcaded interior.
The other way up at the bottom is a slight sketch of buildings on a hill, labelled ‘Altenburgh’,2 and likely showing Altenberg, part of Sankt Andrä-Wördern, on the Danube just west of Burg Greifenstein (see under folio 11 verso; D30023). Finberg later annotated his 1909 Inventory entry (‘Street scene; an interior; castle on hill, &c. – “Allnburgh” &c.’): ‘6a | 7a} ?Albensberg, nr. Ratisbon | Ritenberg. | Count Beust’s Chateau on Danube nr Vienna | Baed. Aust. p 269.’3 The latter suggestion (from an unknown edition of Baedeker’s guidebook to Austria) seems correct, as Graf von Beust, at one stage the Austrian Chancellor, died at Schloss Altenberg in 1882.4 See also folio 7 verso (D30015).
Although Turner’s route upriver was straightforward, his somewhat haphazard use of this book to record it was not. For the geographical sequence of identified views between Vienna and Passau (see under folios 40 recto and 31 recto; D30076, D30058), see this sketchbook’s Introduction.

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
See Powell 1995, p.242.
2
See ibid., as ‘The Altenburg near Vienna’.
3
Undated MS note by Finberg (died 1939) in interleaved copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, opposite p.967.
4
See Heinrich Potthoff, ‘Friedrich Ferdinand, Graf (count) von Beust’, Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed 28 August 2018, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Friedrich-Ferdinand-Graf-von-Beust.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘St Michael’s Church and the Winterreitschule, Vienna, from the Michaelerplatz; a Detail of an Arcade; an Arcaded Interior; ?Altenberg, Sankt Andrä-Wördern, by the River Danube; a Hill and Church 1840 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2018, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-st-michaels-church-and-the-winterreitschule-vienna-from-the-r1196863, accessed 18 April 2024.