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 Liebfrauenkirche at Oberwesel and the Schönburg, Looking Upstream; Bacharach and Burg Stahleck, Looking Downstream 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Liebfrauenkirche at Oberwesel and the Schönburg, Looking Upstream; Bacharach and Burg Stahleck, Looking Downstream’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 62 Recto:
The Liebfrauenkirche at Oberwesel and the Schönburg, Looking Upstream; Bacharach and Burg Stahleck, Looking Downstream 1839
D28473
Turner Bequest CCXC 62
Pencil on flecked off-white wove paper, 100 x 163 mm
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘62’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CCXC–62’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The principal view is of Bachrach, a town which lies in the valleys of the Steeg and Rhine approximately thirty miles south of Koblenz. The spire marks out St Peter’s Evangelical Church and to its left, the ruin of the Gothic Wernerkapelle (its pointed arched windows summarily suggested in an ‘M’-shaped line). The ruin of Castle Stahleck is roughly indicated to the left of the Wernerkapelle atop the small mount. Stahleck is a twelfth-century fortified castle built on the orders of the Archbishop of Cologne. The castle was besieged and sacked on a number of occasions during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) and the War of the Palatine Succession (1688–97), leaving it ruined throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.1
The sketch at bottom right is the lower half of the spire of the Liebfrauenkirche at Oberwesel depicted on the folio opposite (Tate D28472; Turner Bequest CCXC 61a).

Alice Rylance-Watson
July 2013

1
Robert R. Taylor, The Castles of the Rhine: Recreating the Middle Ages in Modern Germany, Waterloo, Ontario 1998, p.284–5.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘The Liebfrauenkirche at Oberwesel and the Schönburg, Looking Upstream; Bacharach and Burg Stahleck, Looking Downstream 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-liebfrauenkirche-at-oberwesel-and-the-schonburg-looking-r1150756, accessed 18 April 2024.