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

With the page inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, the carefully rendered architectural details towards the top right were probably introduced after the slighter horizontal sketch described below, with which they partly overlap. They show the full height and part of the profile of the elaborate Gothic spire of Rotterdam’s Oude Stadhuis (old town hall), along with associated details of scroll mouldings and windows. The building stood on Hoogstraat, not far east of St Lawrence’s Church (the Sint-Laurenskerk); not to be confused with its lost Neo-Classical successor on the Kaasmarkt, or the 1920 City Hall on Coolsingel (as discussed in the entry for a sketch in the 1833 Rotterdam and Rhine sketchbook: Tate D32618; Turner Bequest CCCXXII 41), it is recorded in numerous old prints and drawings.1 Turner showed it clearly on the skyline near the church on folio 79 verso (D18996).

With the page turned horizontally, the slight main view shows cursorily indicated sailing boats moored in the Kolk basin, seen from the south-east with St Lawrence’s tower in the distance. It is a variant of the more detailed scene on folio 42 verso (D19823), under which the subject is discussed, presumably reprised here as the context for the small crowd of figures gathered round a barrel in the foreground, perhaps at a quayside market along the Rijstuin side of the Kolk. See this sketchbook’s Introduction for discussion of its many figure scenes, and studies of individuals, their costume and headgear.

Although the layout of the city’s central streets and harbours has been broadly preserved, very few buildings (notably St Lawrence’s) survived destruction in May 1940, the Kolk has been filled in, and identification is based largely on earlier visual documentation; see under folio 35 recto (D18908) for other views in and around the city in this book and elsewhere.