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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and French ... > Holland, Meuse and Cologne Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Rhine Riverfront at Düsseldorf, between St Lambertus's and St Maximilian's Churches 1825

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Rhine Riverfront at Düsseldorf, between St Lambertus's and St Maximilian's Churches’ 1825
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 36 Verso:
The Rhine Riverfront at Düsseldorf, between St Lambertus’s and St Maximilian’s Churches 1825
D19466
Turner Bequest CCXV 36a
Pencil on white wove paper, 113 x 189 mm
Partial watermark ‘Al | 18’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Finberg later amended his 1909 Inventory entry (‘Views of Cologne, from river’), adding a question mark.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy in the same way.2 They were right to query the subject, which continues across folio 37 recto opposite (D19467), as well as the more detailed double-page view on folios 35 verso–36 recto (D19464–D19465), as Cecilia Powell has since identified them as showing Düsseldorf.3
While the other riverfront prospect noted above is head-on across the Rhine from the west, here the viewpoint is from a little upstream, looking north-eastwards. Beyond moored boats in the distance towards the left here is the slender profile of the spire of St Lambertus’s Church, with the shallow roof of the Schlossturm (now the Schifffahrtmuseum) to its south and the twin spires of St Andreas’s Church, away from the river to their east. The view continues to the right across D19467, where the only conspicuous building is St Maximilian’s church. Despite extensive reconstruction and expansion since 1945, these juxtapositions remain recognisable.
For various views of Düsseldorf in the contemporary Holland sketchbook and elsewhere, see under Tate D19112 (Turner Bequest CCXIV 138) in that book, and compare the overall view on D19117 (CCXIV 140a).

Matthew Imms
September 2020

1
Undated MS note by Finberg (died 1939) in interleaved copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.663.
2
Undated MS note by Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.663.
3
See Powell 1991, p.61 note 36, and Powell 1995, pp.34, 77 note 19.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Rhine Riverfront at Düsseldorf, between St Lambertus’s and St Maximilian’s Churches 1825 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2020, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, March 2023, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-rhine-riverfront-at-dusseldorf-between-st-lambertuss-and-r1202820, accessed 21 July 2025.