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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Meuse-Mosel, Luxembourg and Northern ... > Huy and Dinant Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Givet and Fort Charlemont, Looking Upstream from North of the Town 1824

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Givet and Fort Charlemont, Looking Upstream from North of the Town’ 1824
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 20 Recto:
Givet and Fort Charlemont, Looking Upstream from North of the Town 1824
D20114
Turner Bequest CCXVII 20
Pencil on off-white wove paper, 99 x 162 mm
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘20’ top right and ‘247’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCXVII–20’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This drawing is part of a panoramic prospect of Givet, which extends onto the folio opposite (Tate D41009). On this page Turner shows the Fort Charlemont, a fortress constructed in 1555 to defend the Meuse valley. At the end of the seventeenth century the Fort was strengthened by Louis XIV’s chief military engineer Vauban and centuries later, it would come to play a key role in the Napoleonic Wars.1
The Fort Charlemont is recorded in Turner’s 1824 Rivers Meuse and Moselle sketchbook (Tate D19664–D19671; Turner Bequest CCXVI 57a–61) and in a later sketchbook of 1839 (Tate D28170–D28185, D28187; Turner Bequest CCLXXXVIII 2a–10, 11

Alice Rylance-Watson
January 2014

1
For more information on the Fort Charlemont see ‘Givet’, Fortified Places, accessed 23 January 2014, http://www.fortified-places.com/givet

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Givet and Fort Charlemont, Looking Upstream from North of the Town 1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, January 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, April 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-givet-and-fort-charlemont-looking-upstream-from-north-of-the-r1174312, accessed 19 September 2024.