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 > First Mossel and Oxford Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Burg at Cochem; Cochem, Looking Upstream; Clouds over a River Valley 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Burg at Cochem; Cochem, Looking Upstream; Clouds over a River Valley’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 14 Verso:
The Burg at Cochem; Cochem, Looking Upstream; Clouds over a River Valley 1839
D28318
Turner Bequest CCLXXXIX 14 a
Pencil on white wove drawing paper, 235 x 140 mm
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ‘Cochem’ left, ‘[?Storm]’ top centre
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Here Turner has made two sketches of the town of Cochem, rendered in fine, agile line and orientated inversely to one another. The ruins of the medieval Castle Reichsburg are recorded from close up and from a distance. The castle was first mentioned in a document of 1051 and was for many years the established seat of the palatinate counts until the first German King Konrad III declared it an imperial castle.1 It fell into ruin after an occupation by the French King Louis XIV over the course of the Nine Years War and remained in a decaying state until 1868 when it was rebuilt in the Gothic revival architectural style.2
Below is a roughly wrought jotting of the Moselle valley, with low-lying rolling hills and puffy clouds above.

Alice Rylance-Watson
August 2013

1
‘History of Cochem Castle’, Reichsburg, Cochem, http://www.burg-cochem.de/english/history.htm, accessed 11 July 2013.
2
Ibid.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘The Burg at Cochem; Cochem, Looking Upstream; Clouds over a River Valley 1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 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-burg-at-cochem-cochem-looking-upstream-clouds-over-a-r1150599, accessed 19 April 2024.