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

There are several views here, one above the other, continuing to and fro across folio 15 recto opposite (D30030), where some of the views are the other way up. Cecilia Powell has characterised the drawings in the present sketchbook as generally less refined than those in the 1833 Salzburg and Danube book (Tate; Turner Bequest CCC);1 in discussing folios 14 verso–16 recto (D30029–D30032),2 she has observed: ‘Sometimes the cause is accounted for by Turner himself, as in the group of sketches of the Wachau’, the Danube valley between Krems and Melk, marked ‘“begun in the moonlight at St Michael’s” [on this page]; the adjacent pages of rugged silhouettes have an eerie quality wholly consistent with night-time on the river.’3

As indicated by Turner’s other inscriptions, the drawings here were made around Rossatz-Arnsdorf,4 on the south bank near Krems; see also folios 15 recto and verso (D30030–D30031), and the 1833 Salzburg and Danube sketchbook (Tate D30279–D30280; Turner Bequest CCC 76a–77). The fortified Sankt Michael church is a little way upriver to the south-west, on the north bank, at Mosinghof near Weissenkirchen; see also folio 15 recto opposite (D30030), folio 19 recto (D30037), and the same pages of the 1833 book.

Although Turner’s route upriver was straightforward, his somewhat haphazard use of this book to record it was not. For the geographical sequence of identified views between Vienna and Passau (see under folios 40 recto and 31 recto; D30076, D30058), see this sketchbook’s Introduction.