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

With the page turned horizontally, the main view in this rather disjointed sketch shows houses on a quay, with moored boats. Turner’s scrawled inscription, something like ‘Het Groot Land Kolk’ (likely taken from adjacent signage), denotes it as showing Rotterdam’s Kolk basin from the south-east, with the tower of St Lawrence’s Church (the Sint-Laurenskerk) in the distance, and the Grote Markt square on the left, beyond the Westnieuwland quay. The low, colonnaded structure on the right is the waterside Korenbeurs (corn exchange) along Middensteiger. Above, the upper stage of the tower and the roof of the nave are seen from another angle over undulating gables, and there is a detail of house-fronts at the top right, which may correlate with those towards the foreground in the view of Openrijstuin and Toerrijstuin (opposite Westnieuwland) on folio 68 verso (D18974).

Compare the slight sketch on folio 43 verso (D18925), and the more coherent view on folio 69 verso (D18976). The scene is shown in a 1744 engraving after A. de Haan, De Groote Kerk en Korenbeurs te Rotterdam, van de Draaibrug te zien.1 Turner’s viewpoint would also have been on or near the bridge, outside the Beurs (the stock exchange; see folio 41 verso; D18921). There are studies of parts of the church’s tower and other features on the recto and folio 43 recto opposite (D18922, D18924).

Although the layout of the city’s central streets and harbours has been broadly preserved, the Kolk has been filled in, very few buildings (notably St Lawrence’s) survived destruction in May 1940, 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.

Technical notes:

There is slight staining or foxing, which has passed through the leaf.