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 Beilstein and Burg Metternich, Looking Downstream 1824

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Beilstein and Burg Metternich, Looking Downstream’ 1824
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 29 Recto:
Beilstein and Burg Metternich, Looking Downstream 1824
D20166
Turner Bequest CCXIX 5
Pencil and watercolour on white wove paper, 160 x 235 mm
Watermark ‘[j wha]tman | [turke]y mills | [18]24’
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ‘Pydelstein’
Inscribed in red ink ‘5’ by Ruskin bottom right
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCXIX–5’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This drawing and Tate D20167; Turner Bequest CCXIX 6 show Beilstein on the Moselle, a town nestled at the foot of a ridge atop which a ruined fortification, the Burg Metternich, stands. For the Irish author and traveller Michael Joseph Quin, the medieval structure constituted ‘altogether one of the most picturesque memorials of chivalry to be seen on the Moselle’.1 Following the slope in a downward diagonal, the eye is met by the ornate Baroque spire of St Joseph’s Parish Church, which, at the time of Turner’s visit, was also a Carmelite monastery. At top right Turner has inscribed ‘Pydelstein’, probably his interpretation of the spelling of ‘Beilstein’.
1
Michael Joseph Quin, Steam voyages on the Seine, the Moselle, & the Rhine: with railroad visits to the principal cities of Belgium, London 1843, p.36.
Verso:
Blank

Alice Rylance-Watson
November 2013

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Beilstein and Burg Metternich, Looking Downstream 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-beilstein-and-burg-metternich-looking-downstream-r1174932, accessed 27 April 2024.