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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Northern Germany, the Elbe and Prague ... > Hamburg and Copenhagen Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Copenhagen: The Interior of the Church of Our Lady 1835

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Copenhagen: The Interior of the Church of Our Lady’ 1835
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 32 Recto:
Copenhagen: The Interior of the Church of Our Lady 1835
D30883
Turner Bequest CCCV 32
Pencil on white laid writing paper, 92 x 155 mm
Partial Watermark: portrait head of Frederick William III in a patterned oval with ‘fr. wi. diii’
Inscribed in pencil ‘St B Thomas Jacobus 14 Phippus’ bottom left to centre
Inscribed in red ink by Ruskin ‘32’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCCV–32’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This is a sketch of Copenhagen’s Church of Our Lady, now the city’s cathedral. Turner shows the nave and hemi-spherical apse, decorated with sculptures of Christ and the Apostles by Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844). Thorvaldsen modelled these sculptures in Rome where he maintained a workshop in the stables of the Palazzo Barberini. 1As Tate curator David Blayney Brown writes, Thorvaldsen ‘had apparently been influenced by Greek marbles from Aegina, which he had restored for the King of Bavaria’.2 Turner had seen the very same marbles in Munich in 1833, on a tour through Germany and Austria to Venice. The statues are rendered here in shorthand with an inscription at rear naming: ‘St B’ [Bartholomew], ‘Thomas’, ‘Jacobus’ [James], and ‘Phippus’ [Philip].
For more sketches of Hamburg see Tate D30842–D30860, D30862–D30870, D30872, D30874–D30880, D30882–D30886; Turner Bequest CCCV 11a–20a, 21a–25a, 26a, 27a–30a, 31a–33a.

Alice Rylance-Watson
April 2015

1
Blayney Brown 2002, p.146.
2
Ibid.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Copenhagen: The Interior of the Church of Our Lady 1835 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 2015, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, August 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-copenhagen-the-interior-of-the-church-of-our-lady-r1187260, accessed 20 April 2024.