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

With the page turned horizontally, the view is of Ghent’s Sint Veerleplein, as established by Turner’s careful inscription in the equivalent French, presumably from local signage, and hesitantly but correctly transcribed by Finberg.1 ‘Place Sainte-Pharaïlde’, to amend the artist’s note very slightly, incorporates a radically different form of the local patron saint’s name, ‘Veerle’ in Dutch.

The medieval Gravensteen fortress, with the battlements of its gatehouse on the right, looms over a picturesque variety of gables on the north-west side of the square. Geldmunt recedes northwards to the right; the study of buildings towards the top right may continue directly from the main view. The square would be much changed later in the nineteenth century, with the houses nestling below the castle swept away and the Gravensteen itself stripped back and restored in a more austere form. Various paintings by the local artist François Jean Louis Boulanger (1819–1873) show aspects of the site as Turner knew it; the castle and adjacent buildings are seen from further to the right in Ghent, an 1837 engraving after Turner’s British contemporary Clarkson Stanfield, and in The Gravensteen Gate and the Sint Veerleplein in Ghent, an 1833 painting by the Ghent artist Pieter-Frans (or Pierre-François) De Noter (Ferens Art Gallery, Hull).

The recto (D19240) includes a related view from the east side of the square, and the gatehouse’s battlements are glimpsed in the distance on folio 201 verso (D19239), under which Turner’s other views of the city here and elsewhere are noted. William Callow’s detailed 1850 drawing, Place St Pharailde, Ghent (A00148), shows another aspect of the square.