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 Oberwesel and the Schönburg, Looking Upstream past the Liebfrauenkirche from Inland 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Oberwesel and the Schönburg, Looking Upstream past the Liebfrauenkirche from Inland’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 58 Recto:
Oberwesel and the Schönburg, Looking Upstream past the Liebfrauenkirche from Inland 1839
D28465
Turner Bequest CCXC 58
Pencil on flecked off-white wove paper, 100 x 163 mm
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘58’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CCXC–58’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner took this sketch of Oberwesel from within the town, looking up the Rhine towards the medieval Parish Church of Our Lady (Pfarrkirche Liebfrauen), ‘said to be’, the author and traveller Michael Joseph Quin writes, ‘one of the most finished and beautiful specimens of the decorated style of Gothic architecture to be found on the Rhine’.1 Part of Oberwesel’s turreted defensive wall can be seen in front of the church. Beyond is the twelfth-century Castle Schönburg.
This sketch and those on Tate D28459–D28464; Turner Bequest CCXC 55–57a are the preliminary material for a highly finished watercolour and gouache drawing of 1840.2

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.124.
2
Shanes, Joll, Warrell and others 2000, p.222 no.101.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Oberwesel and the Schönburg, Looking Upstream past the Liebfrauenkirche from Inland 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-oberwesel-and-the-schonburg-looking-upstream-past-the-r1150748, accessed 18 September 2024.