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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Sankt Goar and Burg Rheinfels, Looking Downstream 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 79 Recto:
Sankt Goar and Burg Rheinfels, Looking Downstream 1839
D28507
Turner Bequest CCXC 79 a
Pencil on flecked off-white wove paper, 100 x 163 mm
Inscribed in red ink ‘79a’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CCXC–79a’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Rendered roughly and quickly, here Turner has represented the town of Sankt Goar with the medieval and crenellated Castle Rheinfels above it. In the foreground at left is Sankt Goar’s evangelical church.
Rheinfels is depicted elsewhere in this sketchbook on Tate D28455–D28457, D28506, D28509, D28510; Turner Bequest CCXC 53–54, 78a, 79c, 79d. Turner recorded the castle extensively in the Rhine sketchbook of 1817 (Tate D12918–D12923, D12930–D12932, D12935–D12937, D12952–D19260; Turner Bequest CLXI 21a–24, 26–27a, 29–30, 37a–42). See also the 1841 colour sketch (private collection).1

Alice Rylance-Watson
July 2013

1
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.459 no.1327.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Sankt Goar and Burg Rheinfels, Looking Downstream 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-sankt-goar-and-burg-rheinfels-looking-downstream-r1150790, accessed 25 April 2024.