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 Trarbach, Looking Upstream from the Path to the Grevenburg and up the Hill-Path to Bernkastel; Four Views near Trarbach: Traben and the Grevenburg 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Trarbach, Looking Upstream from the Path to the Grevenburg and up the Hill-Path to Bernkastel; Four Views near Trarbach: Traben and the Grevenburg’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 25 Verso:
Trarbach, Looking Upstream from the Path to the Grevenburg and up the Hill-Path to Bernkastel; Four Views near Trarbach: Traben and the Grevenburg 1839
D28400
Turner Bequest CCXC 25 a
Pencil on flecked off-white wove paper, 100 x 163 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This sketch shows Trarbach as it appeared to Turner on his walk up to the Grevenburg and thus shows the opposite view to that depicted on Tate D28392, D28394; Turner Bequest CCXC 21a, 22a and their respective gouaches (Tate D20275, D20240; Turner Bequest CCXXII P, CCXXI G). Turner shows Trarbach ‘surrounded by a strong wall, still further strengthened by several towers’: observations made by the writer and traveller Michael Joseph Quin. ‘There are three gates’, describes Quin, all ‘in good preservation, surmounted also by towers, which add much to the chivalrous aspect of the place’.1 In the distance, the ‘handsome old church and tapering steeple’ of the Church of St Nicholas can be seen. This view formed the basis of the gouache and watercolour drawing Trarbach from the Grevenburg (Tate D20259; Turner Bequest CCXXI Z).
To the left of the principal sketch are parts of two slight drawings of Traben-Trarbach and the Grevenburg which have been continued from the folio opposite (Tate D28401; Turner Bequest CCXC 26).

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.14.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Trarbach, Looking Upstream from the Path to the Grevenburg and up the Hill-Path to Bernkastel; Four Views near Trarbach: Traben and the Grevenburg 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-trarbach-looking-upstream-from-the-path-to-the-grevenburg-r1150685, accessed 25 April 2024.