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

This pencil drawing is not noted in Finberg’s 1909 Turner Bequest Inventory;1 Cecilia Powell has identified its subject as ‘the inner face of the Leyen Burg at Gondorf’.2 The castle (otherwise known as the Schloss von der Layen) stands above the west bank of the River Mosel, although the present view is of the side away from the river, looking east along what is now Von-der-Leyen-Platz in the municipality of Kobern-Gondorf.

D28999 (Turner Bequest CCXCII 50v), a pencil drawing on a similar sheet in this subsection, shows the castle from the river. It is seen from a similar angle in the 1839 Cochem to Coblenz – Home sketchbook (Tate D28586; Turner Bequest CCXCI 26).3 Compare also the 1824 Rivers Meuse and Moselle sketchbook (D19811; CCXVI 130a), the 1839 First Mossel and Oxford sketchbook (D28305; CCLXXXIX 8) and further views in the Cochem to Coblenz – Home book (D28587–D28588; CCXCI 26a, 27). There is a gouache study on blue paper of about 1839 (Tate D24588; Turner Bequest CCLIX 23), as well as blue paper drawings yet to be firmly dated (Tate D20387, D20396; Turner Bequest CCXXIV 91, 100), and watercolours in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford,4 and the National Museum Wales, Cardiff (recto and verso).5

The more developed drawing on the recto, D28949 (Turner Bequest CCXCII 2), shows Alken, about three miles upriver to the south. For the full range of Mosel subjects associated with the present tour, see the Introduction to this subsection.

Technical notes:

Cecilia Powell has noted this as one of the many sheets of grey 1829 Bally, Ellen and Steart paper used on Turner’s 1840 tour, neatly torn as eighths or sixteenths of the overall sheet, with dimensions of around 190 x 280 or 140 x 190 mm, and variously worked with pencil, watercolour and gouache; see the technical notes in the overall Introduction for others.1