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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > The Second Meuse-Moselle Tour 1839 > Spa, Dinant and Namur Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Citadel and Notre-Dame, Dinant, from the Opposite River Bank, with Figures in the Foreground; Waulsort from the Meuse 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Citadel and Notre-Dame, Dinant, from the Opposite River Bank, with Figures in the Foreground; Waulsort from the Meuse’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 42 Verso:
The Citadel and Notre-Dame, Dinant, from the Opposite River Bank, with Figures in the Foreground; Waulsort from the Meuse 1839
D28122
Turner Bequest CCLXXXVII 42 a
Pencil on white wove writing paper, 94 x 154 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Walsort’ top right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
There are two landscape sketches on this page: the larger of the two depicts Dinant with its citadel, the Collegiate Church of Notre-Dame, while the smaller, orientated inversely and close to the gutter of the sketchbook, represents the nearby village of Waulsort.
The Dinant sketch shows the vertical flank of the rocher surmounted by the fortified citadel and the Collegiate Church of Notre-Dame at its base. The building is instantly recognisable owing to its onion-shaped dome and lantern. Figures have been roughly jotted in at the foreground. The remaining space is used for a small sketch of Waulsort, a village south of Dinant on the banks of the Meuse. Turner has inscribed the bottom left of the sketch ‘Walsort’.
There are traces of a faint under-drawing of the profile of hills running diagonally across the page: the tentative markings of a drawing which was later abandoned. There is also an inverted jotting of a tree at the upper register.
For other views of Dinant in this sketchbook see Tate D28042, D28094, D28122, D28125, D28142, D28147, D28153, D28155–D28158, D28160–D28166, D41091; Turner Bequest CCLXXXVII 1, 27a, 42a, 44a, 53, 56a, 59a, 60a–62a, 63a–66a. There are also colour sketches of the town produced in gouache on blue paper between 1834–9, some with pen and ink and watercolour added (Tate D20227, D20228, D24724, D28984; Turner Bequest CCXX T, U; CCLIX 159, CCXCII 37). There is also a colour sketch of between 1825 and 1834 in the Laing Art Gallery at Newcastle-upon-Tyne (Tyne and Wear Museums) and at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.1
For earlier views of Dinant taken in 1824, see Tate D19556–D19663, D20109–D20113; Turner Bequest CCXVI 53a–57, CCXVII 16–19.

Alice Rylance-Watson
May 2013

1
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.421, nos.1026–7 respectively.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘The Citadel and Notre-Dame, Dinant, from the Opposite River Bank, with Figures in the Foreground; Waulsort from the Meuse 1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-citadel-and-notre-dame-dinant-from-the-opposite-river-r1150396, accessed 20 September 2024.