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 ... > Moselle (or Rhine) Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner River, Hills and Village, possibly Breidel 1824

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘River, Hills and Village, possibly Breidel’ 1824
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 18 Recto:
River, Hills and Village, possibly Breidel 1824
D20173
Turner Bequest CCXIX 12
Pencil and watercolour on white wove paper, 160 x 235 mm
Inscribed in red ink ‘12’ by Ruskin bottom right
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCXIX–12’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Here Turner records a village encircled by lush vegetation on the banks of the Moselle. The village chapel is identified by its sharply tapering spire, leading the eye up toward the contours of a belt of rocky hills.
There is a possibility that Turner shows the village of Breidel here; if this were the case, the chapel would be the eighteenth-century St Martin’s Church and the diminutive cylindrical and turreted building to its left would be the Eulenturm or ‘Owl’s Tower’, the remnants of a medieval fortification once part of Breidel’s defensive walls.
Verso:
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Alice Rylance-Watson
November 2013

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘River, Hills and Village, possibly Breidel 1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 2013, 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-river-hills-and-village-possibly-breidel-r1174920, accessed 23 April 2024.