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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Meuse-Mosel, Luxembourg and Northern ... > Huy and Dinant Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner View down the Meuse to the Abbey at Flône 1824

Image 1 of 2
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘View down the Meuse to the Abbey at Flône’ 1824
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 2 Recto:
View down the Meuse to the Abbey at Flône 1824
D20086
Turner Bequest CCXVII 2
Pencil on off-white wove paper, 99 x 162 mm
Watermark ‘[...]lls | 1[...]’
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘2’ top right and ‘247’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCXVII–2’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This carefully rendered view shows the Meuse valley at the village of Flône (Amay) near Liège. The foreground is occupied with a cluster of boats and barges crossing the placid waters of the Meuse which winds and meanders into the distance. The architecture at centre left is Flône Abbey: a medieval and once ‘important monastery of Augustines, the abbots of which formerly owned the greater part of the coal and lead mines which abound in this district’, the English journalist and author Dudley Costello writes.1 In this drawing the seventeenth-century junction tower is most prominent, a feature described by Costello as a ‘compact brick building, having an air of more comfort than beauty’.2
For more drawings of the Abbey at Flône see Tate D19620, D19642, D28148; Turner Bequest CCXVI 35, 46a, CCLXXXVII 57.
1
Dudley Costello, A tour through the valley of the Meuse: with the legends of the Walloon country and the Ardennes, London 1846, p.99.
2
Ibid.
Technical notes:
The paper has mottled and browned significantly, a result of the drawing’s prolonged exhibition and exposure to sunlight during the nineteenth century.

Alice Rylance-Watson
January 2014

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘View down the Meuse to the Abbey at Flône 1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, January 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, April 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-view-down-the-meuse-to-the-abbey-at-flone-r1174281, accessed 31 October 2025.