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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > The Second Meuse-Moselle Tour 1839 > Trèves to Cochem and Coblenz to Mayence ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Views near and of Ürzig with the Michaelslei 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Views near and of Ürzig with the Michaelslei’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 27 Verso:
Views near and of Ürzig with the Michaelslei 1839
D28404
Turner Bequest CCXC 27 a
Pencil on flecked off-white wove paper, 163 x 100 mm
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ‘St Michael [?B/R...]’ | ‘Third Sty’ (all inverted bottom left); ‘[?...arlen]’ | ‘[?Fairly] all wine’ (all inverted) far right towards bottom; ‘[?Burg F..]’ (inverted) fare left towards bottom; ‘Lusnich’ (possibly Lösnich) (inverted) centre towards right; ‘[Hirm...]’ (inverted) far right centre towards top; ‘Michael Light’ far right towards top; ‘v’ far left towards top
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
These slight sketches depict the village of Ürzig and the Michaelslei, a rocky outcrop on one of the surrounding hillsides. Michael Joseph Quin describes it as an attractive destination for tourists, writing:
in the face of a high red cliff called Michaelsley, may be a castellated wall. This wall covers the mouth of a cavern, which was occupied in the olden time by a band of robbers, each of whom, however, claimed to be of some order of knighthood: it was in a later age the residence of a pious hermit.1
Accessible ‘only by means of a succession of ladders’, it is no surprise, then, that Turner only captured it from afar in these sketches.2 What appears to be the watchtower of the hermitage is repeatedly recorded in a number of these drawings, Turner annotating one with the inscription ‘Third Sty’ (i.e. storey). He has also made note of the vineyards which grow on the valley’s slopes, ‘all wine’, he writes. Other inscriptions on this page are transcribed in the technical description above.
These drawings and one other in the First Mossel and Oxford sketchbook (Tate D28311; Turner Bequest CCLXXXIX 11) formed the basis of a gouache and watercolour of Ürzig and the Michaelslei of c.1839 (Tate D24789; Turner Bequest CCLIX 224).

Alice Rylance-Watson
July 2013

1
Michael Joseph Quin, Steam voyages on the Seine, the Moselle, & the Rhine: with railroad visits to the principal cities of Belgium, London 1843, p.51.
2
Bartholomew Stritch, The Meuse, the Moselle, and the Rhine; or, A six weeks' tour through the finest river scenery in Europe, by B.S., London 1845, vol.II p.8.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Views near and of Ürzig with the Michaelslei 1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-views-near-and-of-rzig-with-the-michaelslei-r1150689, accessed 22 May 2026.