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 Schlossberg and Uhrturm, Graz, above Houses across the River Mur from the Lendkai 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Schlossberg and Uhrturm, Graz, above Houses across the River Mur from the Lendkai’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 44 Recto:
The Schlossberg and Uhrturm, Graz, above Houses across the River Mur from the Lendkai 1840
D30084
Turner Bequest CCXCIX 44
Pencil on cream wove paper, 127 x 198 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Up to Coffee H | Graz’ and ‘X’ top right, ‘[...]’ bottom left, and ‘Dark Road’ bottom right
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘44’ top right, ascending vertically
Stamped in black ‘CCXCIX – 44’ top right, ascending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the page turned horizontally, the view is east across the River Mur at Graz from the Lendkai side, with the castle buildings on the Schlossberg above and the Uhrturm down the slope to the right. Below are buildings along what is now the Kaiser-Franz-Josef-Kai, where Turner notes the ‘Dark Road’; compare a detailed 1830 lithograph of the same prospect, Panorama von Gräz und seiner Umbebung, by the Austrian Leopold Kuwasseg. There is a similar view on the verso (D30085).
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.1 In his 1909 Inventory, in his checklist of what he called the ‘Danube and Graz’ sketchbook (dated to c.1837–40),2 Finberg had recognised folios 42 recto–45 recto (D30080–D30086) as showing the city;3 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.’4

Matthew Imms
September 2018

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

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Schlossberg and Uhrturm, Graz, above Houses across the River Mur from the Lendkai 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-schlossberg-and-uhrturm-graz-above-houses-across-the-r1196934, accessed 26 April 2024.