J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner The North Face of the Porta Nigra, Trier 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 41 Recto:
The North Face of the Porta Nigra, Trier 1839
D28431
Turner Bequest CCXC 41
Pencil on flecked off-white wove paper, 100 x 163 mm
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘41’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CCXC–41’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Here Turner depicts the north face of the Porta Nigra (Black Gate) in Trier. Built between 186 and 200 AD in grey sandstone with iron clamps and molten lead, the Porta served as the north gate in a network of four ancient Romans city gates. From the eleventh century onwards it accommodated two churches, acquiring, as Cecilia Powell writes, ‘numerous accretions and embellishments’ which had, by Turner’s visit, been all but removed under the Napoleonic regime.1 This sketch is the basis of a gouache and watercolour drawing in which the artist has rendered its stern and impregnable architecture in gloomy tones of grey (Tate D20230; Turner Bequest CCXX W).
See also the Portra Nigra in the Trèves and Rhine sketchbook of 1824 (Tate D20141–D20142; Turner Bequest CCXVIII 3–4).

Alice Rylance-Watson
July 2013

1
Powell 1991, p.131 no.48.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘The North Face of the Porta Nigra, Trier 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-the-north-face-of-the-porta-nigra-trier-r1150714, accessed 29 March 2024.