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 The Sauvenière and Groesbeck Springs, Spa; The Tonnelet Spring, Spa 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Sauvenière and Groesbeck Springs, Spa; The Tonnelet Spring, Spa’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 22 Verso:
The Sauvenière and Groesbeck Springs, Spa; The Tonnelet Spring, Spa 1839
D28085
Turner Bequest CCLXXXVII 22 a
Pencil on white wove writing paper, 94 x 154 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Gorsbecke, Geronston, Gerostan’ | ‘Tonely’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the sketchbook orientated horizontally relative to the foliation, Turner has sketched a view of the three-storeyed house at the site of the Sauvenière mineral springs. To its right the pedimented stone aedicule which shelters the Groesbeck spring has been suggested in basic outline.1 Turner’s inscriptions of ‘Gorsbecke, Geronston, Gerostan’ near Groesbeck probably constitute his approximations at the spelling of the spring. ‘Geronston’ and ‘Gerostan’ may be a transcription of ‘Géronstère’, another local mineral spring near Spa, as Alexander Finberg writes.2 This sketch is related to the drawing on the previous folio depicting Sauvenière spring (Tate D28084; Turner Bequest CCLXXXVII 22).
With the sketchbook orientated in accordance with the foliation, Turner has roughly drawn a diminutive landscape across the upper register. There is an inscription which appears to read ‘Tonely’ (Tonnelet) above it.

Alice Rylance-Watson
April 2013

1
Powell 1991, p.171, no.117.
2
Finberg 1990, vol.II, p.917.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘The Sauvenière and Groesbeck Springs, Spa; The Tonnelet Spring, Spa 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-the-sauveniere-and-groesbeck-springs-spa-the-tonnelet-spring-r1150359, accessed 04 April 2026.