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 Five Sketches of the Moselle near Trier 1824

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Five Sketches of the Moselle near Trier’ 1824
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 99 Recto:
Five Sketches of the Moselle near Trier 1824
D19744
Turner Bequest CCXVI 98
Pencil on white wove paper, 118 x 78 mm
Inscribed in pencil ‘St Mary Martyr’ top right; ‘Rowe [?Parl...]’ top right towards centre; ‘Pl[...]’ centre right
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘98’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CCXVI–98’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Here Turner records a series of five Moselle views as he journeyed away from Trier in the direction of Pfalzel on 29 August 1824. The uppermost sketch is inscribed ‘St Mary Martyr’ and depicts one of the four Benedictine abbeys located near Trier. The nineteenth-century travel writer Alois Schreiber writes that the ‘convent of Marie aux Martyrs... is built on the spot where the castle of the prefects of the palace of Gaul stood, and where many Christians suffered martyrdom’.1 The convent is shown again on Tate D20082; Turner Bequest CCXVI 271a. The remaining sketches show scenes on the Moselle near Pfalzel and Ruwer (see Tate D19745; Turner Bequest CCXVI 98a).

Alice Rylance-Watson
April 2014

1
Alois Wilhelm Schreiber, The travellers’ guide down the Rhine: exhibiting the course of that river from Schaffhausen to Holland, and describing the Moselle from Coblentz to Treves with an account of the cities, towns, villages, prospects, etc, London 1825, p.192.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Five Sketches of the Moselle near Trier 1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 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-five-sketches-of-the-moselle-near-trier-r1174535, accessed 26 April 2024.