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

In this drawing Turner depicts Marche-les-Dames, a Meuse village located some five miles downstream from the Belgian city of Namur. As Cecilia Powell notes, Marche-les-Dames derived its name from ‘the foundation of an abbey in 1101 “by 139 noble ladies, the widows of Crusaders who had accompanied Godfrey de Bouillon to the Holy Land”.’1

The chateau of Prosper Louis, the 7th Duke of Arenberg, can be seen overlooking the riverbank. It was built in the early nineteenth century by Jean-Joseph Jaumenne, a celebrated ironmaster of the Napoleonic Empire.2 The façade of Arenberg’s house, and the local church on the hill located directly behind the house, is left in ‘negative’. The buildings appear rather ghosted, described with no other media than a thin veil of white gouache. Their forms seem at once integrated into the view and erased from it.

To the left of a gently undulating shrub-dotted hillside are the vertiginous limestone cliffs which characterise the fluvial topography of this side of the Meuse. These are the same ‘high rocks’, which the travel writer Dudley Costello found to ‘give so imposing a character’ to Marche-les-Dames, here rendered by Turner in pale terracotta, rust red and olive green.3 The bold striations and fissures represented by the artist are, Cecilia Powell notes, ‘a particular feature’ of the rocks on this stretch of the Meuse valley (see also Tate D24736; Turner Bequest CCLIX 171). ⁴

This drawing is based on preparatory pencil sketches found in the Spa, Dinant, and Namur sketchbook (Tate D28129–D28130; Turner Bequest CCLXXXVII 46 a–47).

Verso:

Inscribed in pencil ‘?’, ‘221’, and ‘25b’ at centre towards right; stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram and ‘CCXXII–C’ at bottom left; inscribed in pencil ‘CCXXII–C’ at bottom centre.