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 St Burkard's Church, the Käppele and Marienberg, Würzburg, across the River Main 1840

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘St Burkard's Church, the Käppele and Marienberg, Würzburg, across the River Main’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 87 Recto:
St Burkard’s Church, the Käppele and Marienberg, Würzburg, across the River Main 1840
D30626
Turner Bequest CCCIII 86
Pencil on flecked pale blue laid paper, 104 x 170 mm
Partial watermark: Tree of Liberty
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘86’ bottom left, descending vertically
Stamped in black ‘CCCIII – 86’ bottom left, descending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘The citadel’): ‘The Marienberg from the Main’.1 Finberg marked another copy in the same way.2 With the page turned horizontally, the view is south-west over the River Main from Würzburg’s Alte Mainbrücke. On the skyline opposite, as in many other views of the city, is the Marienberg fortress. Above the weir on the left are the twin spires of St Burkard’s Church, with those of the Käppele on the hillside beyond.3 The scene remains much the same apart from numerous trees on the Marienberg’s ramparts. There are similar prospects on the verso (D30627) and folio 86 verso opposite (D30625; Turner Bequest CCCIII 85a).
For the extensive sequence of Würzburg views in this sketchbook and others elsewhere, see under folio 72 verso (D30596; CCCIII 71).

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
Undated MS note by Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.981.
2
Undated MS note by Finberg (died 1939) in interleaved copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.981.
3
See Powell 1995, p.244.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘St Burkard’s Church, the Käppele and Marienberg, Würzburg, across the River Main 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-st-burkards-church-the-kappele-and-marienberg-wurzburg-r1196382, accessed 20 September 2024.