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 Mayen with the Genovevaburg and St Clement's Church 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Mayen with the Genovevaburg and St Clement's Church’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 43 Recto:
Mayen with the Genovevaburg and St Clement’s Church 1839
D28435
Turner Bequest CCXC 43
Pencil on flecked off-white wove paper, 100 x 163 mm
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ‘Mayen built by Julius Caesar’ bottom
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘43’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CCXC–43’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This rough, summary sketch depicts the Genovevaburg at left and the town of Mayen over which it presides at right. The celebrated twisted spire of St Clement’s Church is at lower right. According to the note at the bottom of the page Turner was under the impression that Mayen was ‘built by Julius Caeser’, an opinion, Cecilia Powell writes, ‘not mentioned in modern guidebooks but on par with many other nineteenth-century beliefs about the Rhineland’.1
This sketch and those on Tate D28434, D28436, D28437; Turner Bequest CCXC 42a, 43a, 44 provided Turner with the information to produce a striking scene of the Genovevaburg and Mayen at sunset (Tate D20254; Turner Bequest CCXXI U).

Alice Rylance-Watson
July 2013

1
Powell 1991, p.150 no.83.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Mayen with the Genovevaburg and St Clement’s Church 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-mayen-with-the-genovevaburg-and-st-clements-church-r1150718, accessed 01 April 2026.