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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner Four Views of the River Rhine: Two of the Lorelei, Looking downstream to Burg Katz; Cliffs near the Lorelei; the Lorelei, with a Boat 1817

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Four Views of the River Rhine: Two of the Lorelei, Looking downstream to Burg Katz; Cliffs near the Lorelei; the Lorelei, with a Boat’ 1817
Folio 1 Verso:
Four Views of the River Rhine: Two of the Lorelei, Looking downstream to Burg Katz; Cliffs near the Lorelei; the Lorelei, with a Boat 1817
D12703
Turner Bequest CLX 1a
Pencil on white wove paper, 150 x 94 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Laureligh’ top centre and ‘Luruley’ towards top right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
These sketches, with those on folio 2 recto opposite (D12704), were made on Turner’s return journey downstream along the Rhine from the south. Views from midstream evidently made from a boat, they focus on the Lorelei (Lurleiburg) on the east bank of the river, which fascinated Turner and features in seven of the watercolours of Rhine scenery that he sold to Walter Fawkes later in 1817. The top sketch, looking past the great rock on the right towards the town of St Goarshausen and Burg Katz (Neukatzenelnbogen) on the crag above, became the basis of Fawkes’s watercolour Lurleiburg and St Goarshausen (British Museum, London).1 The bottom drawing, showing a small boat moored beneath the rock, anticipates another Fawkes watercolour of the Lorelei (Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester).2

David Blayney Brown
June 2025

1
Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, Fribourg 1979, p.379 no.684, reproduced.
2
Ibid., p.375 no.646, reproduced.

How to cite

David Blayney Brown, ‘Four Views of the River Rhine: Two of the Lorelei, Looking downstream to Burg Katz; Cliffs near the Lorelei; the Lorelei, with a Boat 1817’, catalogue entry, June 2025, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, June 2026, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/four-views-of-the-river-rhine-two-of-the-lorelei-looking-downstream-to-burg-katz-cliffs-r1212071, accessed 14 September 2026.