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

With the page turned horizontally, two related views show the skyline of Amsterdam to the south-west across the River IJ. From left to right in the more detailed prospect below, identifiable features include the cupola of the Oosterkerk within the city’s eastern shipyards (compare folio 116 recto; D19068), the spires of the Zuiderkerk and Oude Kerk near the centre, followed by the cupola of the Royal Palace and slim spire of the Nieuwe Kerk, the lost Jan Roodenpoortstoren, the dome of the Ronde Lutherse Kerk (‘round Lutheran church’) and the ‘Westertoren’ steeple of the Westerkerk.

Most are shown on a slightly larger scale on folio 117 verso opposite (D19071); compare also the fragmentary variations on the verso (D19073), The riverfront has since seen extensive changes, with the Westerdok and Oosterdok, the Victorian railway station and tower blocks, making some of Turner’s sightlines difficult to confirm. See under folio 81 recto (D18999) for other views in and around the city in this book and elsewhere.

There are moored sailing boats, indications of the IJ’s northern bank and possibly a figure in the foreground, which is given greater prominence in the upper variant, bringing in trees and a building on the left. This is possibly the isolated Tolhuis (see folios 112 recto and verso; D19060–D19061); the adjacent land to its west has since seen much industrial and suburban development. It is marked on nineteenth-century maps of the time as the Buiksloter polder south-west of the village of Buiksloot, and this is perhaps what Turner’s scrawled note attempted to convey, rather than Finberg’s tentatively transcribed ‘Lenlooth’, which he proposed as indicating ‘Loenesrsloet [sic], between Amsterdam and Utrecht’.1 Loenersloot is a village roughly ten miles south-east of Amsterdam; Turner did travel on to Utrecht (see under folio 128 verso; D19093), but there is no other indication that he passed that way.