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 ... > Trieste, Graz and Danube Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The View up the River Mur from the Grieskai, Graz, to the Schlossberg, with the Suspension Bridge in the Distance; the City from the West 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The View up the River Mur from the Grieskai, Graz, to the Schlossberg, with the Suspension Bridge in the Distance; the City from the West’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 43 Verso:
The View up the River Mur from the Grieskai, Graz, to the Schlossberg, with the Suspension Bridge in the Distance; the City from the West 1840
D30083
Turner Bequest CCXCIX 43a
Pencil on cream wove paper, 127 x 198 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Bridge’ towards bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the page turned horizontally, the main view is north-east across the River Mur to the Schlossberg, with the Uhrturm clocktower on the right. Above appears to be a two-stage detail of the tall, domed tower of the Franziskanerkirche, overlooking the river beyond the right-hand edge of the main prospect. The viewpoint is the Grieskai, leading on to the Lendkai on the left, with the arc of the suspension bridge then spanning the river in the distance,1 although the buildings and what appears to be a statue on the left are not immediately recognisable.
Compare the recto (D30082), and the recto and verso of folio 42 (D30080–D300081). At the gutter, below a faint horizontal pencil line, Turner has squeezed in another view, with the Schlossberg beyond various towers to the east.
Turner’s views of Graz are mainly concentrated between folios 41 verso and 48 recto (D30079–D30092), and were likely made in reverse of the sketchbook’s present foliated order; see under D30079 for further discussion.2 In his 1909 Inventory, in his checklist of what he called the ‘Danube and Graz’ sketchbook (dated to c.1837–40),3 Finberg had recognised folios 42 recto–45 recto (D30080–D30086) as showing the city;4 in 1930’s In Venice with Turner, he linked the book among others to a supposed 1835 tour to the city. Apart from mentioning ‘sketches on the Danube between Vienna and Lintz’, his only other comment appears slightly bemused: ‘I am not sure that he went to Graz; the sketches on pp. 42 to 45 seem to have been made from a distance.’5

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
See Powell 1995, p.241.
2
See also ibid., pp.66, 81 note 22.
3
See Finberg 1909, II, pp.967–70.
4
Ibid., p.969.
5
Finberg 1930, p.168.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The View up the River Mur from the Grieskai, Graz, to the Schlossberg, with the Suspension Bridge in the Distance; the City from the West 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-view-up-the-river-mur-from-the-grieskai-graz-to-the-r1196933, accessed 26 April 2024.