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

This page was used vertically in four distinct bands. In the upper two, Turner drew typically deft studies of sailing barges1 under way, and below, two views of Rotterdam, with the one at the bottom inverted.

As Fred Bachrach recognised, the first subject includes the Wester Nieuwe Hoofdpoort (or Wittepoort) and its cupola (see also the verso, D32604, and folios 43 verso and 44 recto; D32625–D32626; CCCXXII 44a, 45) to the north-east at the west end of the Nieuwe Haven, with windmills along the riverbank; the gateway was demolished in 1854.2 The second is taken from the Nieuwe Maas (New Meuse) river nearby, showing windmills beside the Zalmhaven on the left, just to the west, and the tower of St Lawrence’s Church (the Sint-Laurenskerk) in the centre of the city to the north on the right.3 Trees towards the gutter are carried over a little onto folio 31 verso opposite (D32602; Turner Bequest CCCXXII 32a), where there is another outlying harbour scene.

Although the layout of central Rotterdam’s streets and harbours has been broadly preserved, very few buildings (notably St Lawrence’s) survived destruction in May 1940, and identification is based largely on earlier visual documentation; see under folio 14 recto (D32568; CCCXXII 15) for other views in and around the city in this book and elsewhere.

The shipping in the foreground of the bottom view here is shown contre-jour with the low sun behind a mast throwing the sails and the hull(s) and water in the foreground into silhouette, showing Turner’s occasional eye for the play of light and shade in his pencil sketches (usually restricted to unshaded outlines), and his wider interest in pictorial impressions of atmosphere, reinforced by his written note of ‘Sun behind the sail’.