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 Stift Säusenstein, with a Distant View; Grein and Schloss Greinburg on the River Danube 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Stift Säusenstein, with a Distant View; Grein and Schloss Greinburg on the River Danube’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 16 Verso:
Stift Säusenstein, with a Distant View; Grein and Schloss Greinburg on the River Danube 1840
D30033
Turner Bequest CCXCIX 16a
Pencil on cream wove paper, 198 x 127 mm
Partial watermark ‘atman’
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Burnt by Napoleon’ towards top right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner used this page vertically both ways up, and horizontally too, for a total of five views, all identified by Cecilia Powell.1 With the page inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, at the top are two views of the monastery of Stift Säusenstein, on the east bank north-east of Ybbs, with a note that it had been ‘Burnt by Napoleon’ several decades previously; the complex has been restored in recent years; see also folio 15 recto (D30030).
The other way up and along the gutter are three views of Schloss Greinburg,2 high up north-west of the tight bend at Grein, over ten miles on to the west from Säusenstein. It appears again on folio 17 recto opposite (D30034); for other views on this journey and from 1833, see under folio 15 verso (D30031).
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.241.
2
Ibid., p.241.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Stift Säusenstein, with a Distant View; Grein and Schloss Greinburg on the River Danube 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-stift-sausenstein-with-a-distant-view-grein-and-schloss-r1196883, accessed 05 August 2025.