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 > Spa, Dinant and Namur Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Distant View of Namur from Saint-Servais 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Distant View of Namur from Saint-Servais’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 12 Verso:
Distant View of Namur from Saint-Servais 1839
D28065
Turner Bequest CCLXXXVII 12 a
Pencil on white wove writing paper, 94 x 154 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Sambre R[?iver]’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The Sambre is a tributary of the Meuse River flowing through northern France and Wallonia. The publisher William Chambers had encountered it on the way to Namur during his 1841 tour of the region, writing: ‘Within Hainault lies the picturesque and beautiful valley of the Sambre, a small river which we see on our right on descending to Namur, where it falls into the Meuse’.1
With rapid, gestural handling Turner depicts the Sambre’s trajectory through picturesque pastoral topography. Namur, which stands at the confluence of the two rivers, is suggested in the distance amongst gently sloping hills and rocky crags. The dome of Saint-Aubin Cathedral can be seen faintly in the centre. Turner has inscribed the bottom right of the drawing ‘Sambre river’.
For other views of Namur from Saint-Servais in this sketchbook see Tate D28069, D28151–D28152; Turner Bequest CCLXXXVII 14 a, 58a–59.

Alice Rylance-Watson
April 2013

1
William Chambers, A Tour in Switzerland in 1841, London 1842, p.7.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Distant View of Namur from Saint-Servais 1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 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-distant-view-of-namur-from-saint-servais-r1150339, accessed 19 April 2024.