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 > Trèves to Cochem and Coblenz to Mayence ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Grevenburg and Trarbach, Looking Upstream from the Path from the Town to the Ruins 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Grevenburg and Trarbach, Looking Upstream from the Path from the Town to the Ruins’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 23 Recto:
The Grevenburg and Trarbach, Looking Upstream from the Path from the Town to the Ruins 1839
D28395
Turner Bequest CCXC 23
Pencil on flecked off-white wove paper, 100 x 163 mm
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘23’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CCXC–23’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Rendered with agile line, this sketch depicts the hollowed and crumbling ruins of the Grevenburg Castle with Trarbach below. Grevenburg was constructed in 1350 by Count Johann III of Sponheim-Starkenburg but was later conquered in 1680 by Louis XIV of France and extended, together with the fort of Montroyal, as part of the King’s artillery.1 The castle was besieged on a number of occasions between 1702 and 1730 and was finally destroyed by the French in 1734.2
For other sketches of Trarbach and the Grevenburg see Tate D28391–D28394, D28400–D28401; Turner Bequest CCXC 21a–22a, 25a–26. See also the First Mossel and Oxford sketchbook of the 1839 tour (Tate D28308, D28310; Turner Bequest CCLXXXIX 9a, 10a). For other 1839 colour drawings see Tate D20223, D20234, D20240, D20259, D20275; Turner Bequest CCXX P, CCXXI A, G, Z, CCXXII P).

Alice Rylance-Watson
July 2013

1
‘Grevenburg Castle Ruins’, Mosel Treffpunkt: Traben-Trarbach, http://www.traben-trarbach.de/nextshopcms/show.asp?lang=en&e1=994, accessed 16 July 2013.
2
Ibid.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘The Grevenburg and Trarbach, Looking Upstream from the Path from the Town to the Ruins 1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 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-grevenburg-and-trarbach-looking-upstream-from-the-path-r1150680, accessed 19 April 2024.