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 'Pouhon Pierre Le Grand', Spa 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The 'Pouhon Pierre Le Grand', Spa’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 35 Recto:
The ‘Pouhon Pierre Le Grand’, Spa 1839
D28108
Turner Bequest CCLXXXVII 35
Pencil on white wove writing paper, 94 x 154 mm
Watermarked ‘[F]ellows | [181]0’
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘a la memoire de pierre le grand’ | ‘Spa’
Inscribed by John Ruskin in blue ink ‘350’ bottom right and ‘35’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXXVII–35’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
In his account of a tour through the region in 1841, the Scottish publisher William Chambers wrote that the resort of Spa was ‘highly distinguished’ for its healing mineral springs but that its
celebrity was sustained by various royal valetudinarians from different parts of Europe, and nobles without number. The greatest patron of all, however, was Peter the Great of Russia, who visited it in 1717 – a circumstance never to be forgotten by the inhabitants; for, in gratitude for the benefits which he received, he built a handsome edifice with a portico over the main spring, the Pouhon, at the centre of the village.1
It is this building erected in honour of the Russian monarch’s visit to Spa which Turner has pictured in the present drawing. As Cecilia Powell writes, the pencil sketch ‘shows clearly the five bays of the building above its peristyle of Tuscan columns’ and the inscription on its entablature: ‘a la memoire de pierre le grand’ (‘In memory of Peter the Great’).2
The sketch is a preparatory work for a gouache, pen and ink and watercolour drawing which features a diligence stagecoach and a canopied building on the right (Tate D24610; Turner Bequest CCLIX 45).

Alice Rylance-Watson
May 2013

1
William Chambers, A Tour in Switzerland in 1841, London 1842, p.8.
2
Powell 1991, p.170, no.115.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘The ‘Pouhon Pierre Le Grand’, Spa 1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 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-pouhon-pierre-le-grand-spa-r1150382, accessed 23 April 2024.