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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner View Downstream from the Riverfront at Bernkastel with St Nicholas's Hospital, Kues, on the Left 1824

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 5 Recto:
View Downstream from the Riverfront at Bernkastel with St Nicholas’s Hospital, Kues, on the Left 1824
D20180
Turner Bequest CCXIX 19
Pencil and watercolour on white wove paper, 160 x 235 mm
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCXIX–19’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This swiftly rendered pencil sketch incorporates no chalk highlights as other views of Bernkastel in this sketchbook have done: the effect is a rather sombre grey on grey scene. Turner shows the town of Kues at left, sister to Bernkastle, which lies on the opposite side of the Moselle. Kues’s hospital, named after St Nicholas, is visible too.
This drawing and others in the 1824 sketchbooks are related to a highly finished watercolour of the town and its castle produced in around 1830; see Tate D19757–D19760, D20176–D20179, D20181–D20182; Turner Bequest CCXVI 104a–106, CCXIX 15–18, 20–21.1 For later views of the two towns see the 1839 First Mossel and Oxford and the Trèves to Cochem and Coblenz to Mayence sketchbooks (Tate D28312–D28313, D28406–D28409, D28411–D28412; Turner Bequest CCLXXXIX 11a–12, CCXC 28a–30, 31–31a). See also a vividly coloured gouache on blue paper of c.1839 (Private collection).2
1
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.465 no.1378; reproduced in colour in Powell 1995, p.108.
2
Wilton 1979, p.422 no.1029.
Verso:
Blank

Alice Rylance-Watson
November 2013

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘View Downstream from the Riverfront at Bernkastel with St Nicholas’s Hospital, Kues, on the Left 1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 2013, 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-downstream-from-the-riverfront-at-bernkastel-with-st-r1174906, accessed 26 April 2024.