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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Venice, Austria and Southern Germany ... > Trieste, Graz and Danube Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Schlossberg, Graz; City Walls, Probably at Vienna 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Schlossberg, Graz; City Walls, Probably at Vienna’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 2 Verso:
The Schlossberg, Graz; City Walls, Probably at Vienna 1840
D30005
Turner Bequest CCXCIX 2a
Pencil on cream wove paper, 127 x 198 mm
Partial watermark ‘atman’
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘V’ left of centre
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the page turned horizontally, most of it is taken up with a rapidly rendered urban view with a few trees and a distant spire. Prompted by Turner’s ‘V’, Cecilia Powell has suggested that the substantial forms in the foreground are the city walls of Vienna,1 of which only fragments now remain. For other views of the city, see under folio 40 recto (D30076).
Separated by a pencil line, at the right is an outline of buildings on a hill, apparently as a reprise of the full-page view of the Schlossberg at Graz on folio 3 recto opposite (D30006); for other views there, see under folio 41 verso (D30079). If the respective identifications are correct, this smaller drawing would have been made first.
1
See Powell 1995, p.242.
Technical notes:
There is staining towards the top left and right from the leather pencil loops secured under the front paste-down (D41222).

Matthew Imms
September 2018

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Schlossberg, Graz; City Walls, Probably at Vienna 1840 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2018, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-schlossberg-graz-city-walls-probably-at-vienna-r1196855, accessed 25 April 2024.