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

The principal view is of the Castle Stolzenfels, built into the foothills of the Rhine valley near Koblenz. Completed in 1259, the castle was constructed to defend a toll station on the river. Over the centuries it has been extended several times, occupied and destroyed by French and Swedish troops during both the Thirty Years’ and Nine Years’ Wars. It lay in ruin until 1815 when the Prussian King Frederick William IV was given the castle as a gift by the city of Koblenz. Schloss Stolzenfels was then remodelled in the fashionable neo-Gothic style, an architecture which recalled its chivalric past.1

At top right is a small and slight jotting of St John’s Church at Niederlahnstein which has existed at the mouth of the Lahn since the ninth century.2

For other representations of the Schloss Stolzenfels in this sketchbook see Tate D28525, D28527, D28528; Turner Bequest CCXC 85a, 86a, 87. For earlier drawings see the Waterloo and Rhine and Rhine sketchbooks of 1817 (Tate D12808, D12812, D12882, D12907, D12909, D12975, D12977; CLX 55a, 57a, 93, CLXI 14, 16, 49a, 50a). See also the 1824 Meuse and Moselle sketchbook (Tate D19829, D19831; Turner Bequest CCXVI 139a, 140a).