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

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 to the left and the Uhrturm down the slope to the right, supplemented by details above the skyline, including the tall, domed tower of the Franziskanerkirche beyond the right-hand edge of the main prospect. The closely packed buildings along what is now the Kaiser-Franz-Josef-Kai retain a similar character today; although drawn rapidly and economically, some can be directly matched with those in a detailed 1830 lithograph of the same prospect, Panorama von Gräz und seiner Umbebung, by the Austrian Leopold Kuwasseg (1804–1862).

There is a similar view on the recto (D30084). At the bottom left of the present page there appears to be a small separate sketch, though its subject is unclear; it possibly shows aspects of local costume, with colour notes.

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