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 ... > Rivers Meuse and Moselle Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Four Views just below Huy, the Last Showing the Mansion at Neuville-sous-Huy 1824

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Four Views just below Huy, the Last Showing the Mansion at Neuville-sous-Huy’ 1824
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 36 Recto:
Four Views just below Huy, the Last Showing the Mansion at Neuville-sous-Huy 1824
D19622
Turner Bequest CCXVI 36
Pencil on white wove paper, 78 x 118 mm
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘36’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CCXVI–36’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The last of these four views of the Meuse valley, taken by Turner as he approached Huy, shows the imposing Château de Neuville-sous-Huy. Dating back to the fourteenth century, the castle is depicted in the present drawing over a century after its renovation by the Imperial Knight Lambert d’Olne in 1702.1 The chateau’s picturesque riverside location and Baroque architecture are captured fleetingly here, as the boat from which the artist sketched sailed swiftly on. The building and its extensive grounds are described in detail by Pierre Lambert de Saumery (c.1690–1767) in his Les Délices du Pays de Liège, a five-volume tome decorated with engravings and published between 1738 and 1744. Saumery recounts his first glimpse of the chateau as his boat navigated through bends and meanders of the valley:
En décendent toujours du meme côte entre des gorges bordées de Rochers escarpés, on trouve l’ancien Château de Neuville... cette situation expose au premier coup d’oeil la grandeur de ses solides Bâtimens. La vaste enceinte de murailles dont ils font environnés, leur hauteur & leur solidité, jointes à trois belles Tours dont elles sont flanquées, sont aisément connoitre l’usage guerrier que les anciens Seigneurs vouloient faire de ce Château.2
For Saumery the mansion was: ‘un des beaux Monuments du goût moderne’ and one of the finest of all the great houses on the River Meuse.3

Alice Rylance-Watson
March 2014

1
‘Histoire et Patrimoine Tihangeois: Le château de la Neuville’, Musée-Tihange, accessed 24 March 2014, http://www.musee-tihange.be/chateau_neuville.html
2
Pierre Lambert de Saumery, Les Délices du Pays de Liège, vol.IV, Liège 1744, pp.371–2.
3
Pierre Lambert de Saumery, Les Délices du Pays de Liège, vol.I, Liège 1738, p.372.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Four Views just below Huy, the Last Showing the Mansion at Neuville-sous-Huy 1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, March 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-four-views-just-below-huy-the-last-showing-the-mansion-at-r1174410, accessed 19 April 2024.