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

There are various different sketches here, largely made with the page turned vertically. At the top, as Finberg surmised and Cecilia Powell confirmed,1 is a study of the elevated garden terrace running north from Schloss Rosenau, in the Itz Valley about four miles north-east of Coburg, with its balustrade, urns and fountain (shown in more detail above) leading to a small tower overlooking the wooded prospect. The sketch is continued to the left on folio 62 verso opposite (D31399) with the north front of the house itself, and would have informed the large oil painting of Schloss Rosenau, Seat of H.R.H. Prince Albert of Coburg, near Coburg, Germany exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1841 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool);2 for the few views of the castle in this sketchbook and a related watercolour study, see under folio 22 recto (D31318),3 the main source of the painting’s composition.

Towards the top right of the present page is a thumbnail sketch of the north front’s gable, shown in relation to the turret at the centre of the west front. At right-angles above is a partial study of the south front, similar to the north but distinguished by more extensive fenestration and other details, which ended up being incorporated into the garden front in the painting. Cecilia Powell has suggested that the artist ‘did this deliberately in order to raise the status of the Schloss, rather than in error. Such conflations of material are a common feature of Turner’s art.’4

Across the middle of the page, inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, is a view up to the south front of the Veste Coburg fortress on its hilltop east of Coburg. It is closely related to a contemporary pencil and watercolour study on grey paper (Tate D32190; Turner Bequest CCCXVII 11), which Powell has described as giving ‘a good impression of the very steep ascent ... and the vast size of its walls and bastions. The ‘Bunter Löwe’ bastion, surmounted by a turret and adorned with a huge stone cartouche depicting a lion flanked by griffons, dominates the whole of the right-hand side of the scene; a heavily laden wagon slowly crawls up the steep path on the left’.5 The latter incident is not hinted at here, and the watercolour gives more prominence to the plain arch spanning the road on the left than to the heavily articulated Baroque portal reached by a short bridge over the ravine at the centre. For the numerous Coburg views in this sketchbook, see under folio 1 verso (D31278).6

Again inverted, at the bottom is a slight view of distant buildings. Albeit the other way up, the adjacent note refers to this sketch, apparently having been rewritten after the original inscription below the drawing was inadvertently obscured by the upper part of the Veste Coburg study. Finberg read it as ‘Poffendorf (?) and the Itz’, Powell as ‘Poppendorf on the Ilz’,7 and it is perhaps ‘Poffendorf and the Itz’, referring to the village of that name near the River Itz in the Rattelsdorf area between Coburg and Bamberg (for the latter, see under folio 19 recto; D31312).