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 View up the River Mur at Graz to the Schlossberg, from the Grieskai 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The View up the River Mur at Graz to the Schlossberg, from the Grieskai’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 42 Verso:
The View up the River Mur at Graz to the Schlossberg, from the Grieskai 1840
D30081
Turner Bequest CCXCIX 42a
Pencil on cream wove paper, 127 x 198 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘D [...]’ towards bottom left
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the page turned horizontally, Graz is shown to the north from the Grieskai1 along the west bank of the River Mur, with the Schlossberg rising over the centre of Graz on the opposite side. At the near end of the hill is the Uhrturm clocktower, and below it the tall, domed tower of the Franziskanerkirche. The smaller tower to the right does not appear to survive; it is shown above the bastions of the old town walls which then ran north of what is now Radetzkystrasse, as seen in a 1670 engraving of this prospect by Georg Matthäus Vischer (1628–1696). Compare the views on the recto (D30080) and folio 43 recto and verso (D30082–D30083).
Turner’s views of Graz are mainly concentrated between folios 41 verso and 48 recto (D30079–D30092), and were likely made in reverse of the sketchbook’s present foliated order; see under D30079 for further discussion.2 In his 1909 Inventory, in his checklist of what he called the ‘Danube and Graz’ sketchbook (dated to c.1837–40),3 Finberg had recognised folios 42 recto–45 recto (D30080–D30086) as showing the city;4 in 1930’s In Venice with Turner, he linked the book among others to a supposed 1835 tour to the city. Apart from mentioning ‘sketches on the Danube between Vienna and Lintz’, his only other comment appears slightly bemused: ‘I am not sure that he went to Graz; the sketches on pp. 42 to 45 seem to have been made from a distance.’5

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
See Powell 1995, p.241.
2
See also Powell 1995, pp.66, 81 note 22.
3
See Finberg 1909, II, pp.967–70.
4
Ibid., p.969.
5
Finberg 1930, p.168.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The View up the River Mur at Graz to the Schlossberg, from the Grieskai 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-view-up-the-river-mur-at-graz-to-the-schlossberg-from-r1196931, accessed 16 July 2025.