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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Venice, Austria and Southern Germany ... > Venice; Passau to Würzburg Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner A Distant View of Donaustauf and the Walhalla, near Regensburg, from the River Danube, with a Boat in the Foreground; Veste Coburg 1840

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Distant View of Donaustauf and the Walhalla, near Regensburg, from the River Danube, with a Boat in the Foreground; Veste Coburg’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 43 Recto:
A Distant View of Donaustauf and the Walhalla, near Regensburg, from the River Danube, with a Boat in the Foreground; Veste Coburg 1840
D31360
Turner Bequest CCCX 43
Pencil on cream wove paper, 126 x 198 mm
Partial watermark ‘atman’
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘43’ top right, ascending vertically
Stamped in black ‘CCCX – 43’ top right, ascending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This page was used horizontally both ways up. In the main view, Turner looked north across the Danube Valley between Donaustauf, with its ruined castle overlooking St Michael’s Church on the left, with the smaller pilgrimage church of St Salvator at the centre dominated by the regular form of the classical Walhalla memorial high on the right. The subject was identified by Cecilia Powell.1 Compare two slightly more detailed variants on folio 42 recto (D31358). In the present sketch more attention has been given to swift studies of cargo boats or barges on the river in the foreground.2
Powell has compared the prospects here and on folios 38 recto and 42 recto (D31350, D31358) with that in a lithograph by Jakob Alt (1789–1872), plate 39 of the extensive Donau-Ausichten series published between 1819 and the mid-1820s, several of which Turner had copied in thumbnail sketches in the Trieste, Graz and Danube book while staying in Vienna earlier in the tour; in this case, compare one of the four on Tate D30020 (Turner Bequest CCXCIX 10).3 For numerous contemporary views of Donaustauf, St Salvator’s Church and the Walhalla in this sketchbook and elsewhere, see under folio 33 verso (D31341); for Coburg, see under folio 1 verso (D31278).4
Squeezed in the other way up at the outer edge, there are two similar thumbnail sketches of the Veste Coburg fortress, in parkland north-east of Coburg, from later in the tour; the details are slight but suggest viewpoints to its west. Again, the subject was identified by Powell.5 For other Coburg views, see under folio 1 verso (D31278).6

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
See Powell 1995, p.243.
2
See ibid., p.70.
3
See ibid., pp.67–8, 81 note 29, 242.
4
See also ibid., pp.72, 82 notes 63 and 64.
5
See ibid., p.243.
6
See also ibid., pp.72, 82 notes 63 and 64.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘A Distant View of Donaustauf and the Walhalla, near Regensburg, from the River Danube, with a Boat in the Foreground; Veste Coburg 1840 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2018, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-a-distant-view-of-donaustauf-and-the-walhalla-near-r1196148, accessed 20 September 2024.