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 ... > Würzburg, Rhine and Ostend Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Tower of Mechelen (Malines) Cathedral, with Other Buildings 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Tower of Mechelen (Malines) Cathedral, with Other Buildings’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 3 Recto:
The Tower of Mechelen (Malines) Cathedral, with Other Buildings 1840
D30464
Turner Bequest CCCIII 3
Pencil on flecked pale blue laid paper, 104 x 170 mm
Partial watermark: Tree of Liberty
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘3’ bottom left, descending vertically
Stamped in black ‘CCCIII – 3’ bottom left, descending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The drawing was made with the page turned horizontally. Finberg later correctly annotated his generic 1909 Inventory entry (‘Do. [i.e. ditto: Landscape, with church], &c.’): ‘Mechlin’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy in the same way.2 This was the traditional English spelling of Mechelen (in Dutch, ‘Malines’ in French), a Flemish city north of Brussels and south of Antwerp, and one of the last stops on the 1840 tour (see the sketchbook’s Introduction).
The slight view here includes the upper stages of the ninety-seven metre (320 foot) tower of St Rumbold’s Cathedral, with its truncated spire, soaring over various gabled and turreted buildings typical of the city. There is a view showing more of the cathedral on the verso (D30465); the Mechelen sketches and a few others fall within a sequence of coastal views at Ostend, roughly seventy miles to the west, which marked the end of Turner’s long Continental itinerary; see under folio 1 recto (D30460).3
There is a distant view of the tower, labelled ‘Malines’, in the 1817 Dort sketchbook (Tate D12997; Turner Bequest CLXII 1a).
1
Undated MS note by Finberg (died 1939) in interleaved copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.978.
2
Undated MS note by Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.978.
3
See also Powell 1995, pp.72, 82 note 71, 246.
Technical notes:
For discussion of the watermark, see the overall technical notes in the sketchbook’s introduction.1

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
See also Bower 1999, pp.102–3.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Tower of Mechelen (Malines) Cathedral, with Other Buildings 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-the-tower-of-mechelen-malines-cathedral-with-other-buildings-r1196224, accessed 25 April 2024.