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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Château des Comtes de Bryas, Fumay; Views by or near the Meuse 1824

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 64 Recto:
Château des Comtes de Bryas, Fumay; Views by or near the Meuse 1824
D19677
Turner Bequest CCXVI 64
Pencil on white wove paper, 118 x 78 mm
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ‘Corn’ far right centre
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘64’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CCXVI–64’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Both Finberg and Cecilia Powell catalogue this sketch as showing ‘Views on’, ‘by’, or ‘near’ the Meuse. This cataloguer is able to identify that the central view, depicting a large house with striking bell-shaped twin spires, is the Château des Comtes de Bryas at Fumay in the French Ardennes. Constructed for the noble family of Bryas between the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, the house was constructed with local Mosan blue stone and slate.1 Turner depicts the chateau as it stands today, overlooking a picturesque horseshoe meander of the Meuse.
The Baroque clock tower with tall lantern to the immediate top right of Bryas Chateau is the same as that shown at a distance in the uppermost sketch. This may have once belonged to the Church of Saint-Georges, before it was renovated in the neo-Gothic architectural style in the late nineteenth century. The tower appears again in sketch of 1839: Tate D28189; Turner Bequest CCLXXXVIII 12.

Alice Rylance-Watson
March 2014

1
‘Château des comtes de Bryas à Fumay, Ardennes’, Patrimoine de France, accessed 14 April 2014, http://patrimoine-de-france.com/ardennes/fumay/chateau-des-comtes-de-bryas-14.php

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Château des Comtes de Bryas, Fumay; Views by or near the Meuse 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-chateau-des-comtes-de-bryas-fumay-views-by-or-near-the-meuse-r1174465, accessed 19 September 2024.