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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Meuse-Mosel, Luxembourg and Northern ... > Rivers Meuse and Moselle Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Distant Views of Bouvignes and the Castle of Crèvecoeur, Looking up the Meuse to Dinant 1824

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Distant Views of Bouvignes and the Castle of Crèvecoeur, Looking up the Meuse to Dinant’ 1824
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 52 Verso:
Distant Views of Bouvignes and the Castle of Crèvecoeur, Looking up the Meuse to Dinant 1824
D19654
Turner Bequest CCXVI 52 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 118 x 78 mm
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ‘Wood’, ‘Lighter than Maas’, ‘Road’, ‘Bouvine Chatux’ left to right top towards centre
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
In this series of sketches Turner pictures his first sights of the ruined castle of Crèvecoeur (‘Bouvine Chatux’) and the village of Bouvignes sheltered below it. ‘There are few sites more picturesque’, the Victorian author and journalist Dudley Costello writes of the fortress: its name, Crèvecoeur, given ‘as a taunt and defiance to the people of Dinant, the mortal enemies of those of Bouvignes’ (the French verb ‘Crever’ means to burst, break or even to die and ‘coeur’ is the word for heart, thus the name ‘Breaking Heart’).1 Constructed in 1320 to defend Bouvignes, the castle became ruined in 1554 when it was violently besieged by French troops.2 Legend has it that three widowed wives of local knights fought to defend Crèvecoeur alongside their army, but their efforts were in vain as ammunition ran out.3 The three women are said to have thrown themselves off the castle walls, rather dying than being captured by enemy forces.4
Bouvignes is only summarily suggested in Turner’s drawings, but the spire of the Church of Saint-Lambert is shown in almost all of the views. For more depictions of Crèvecoeur and its village, see Tate D19655, D19658, D19659, D20228, D28054, D28094, D28138, D28139, D28161; Turner Bequest CCXVI 53, 54a, 55, CCXX U, CCLXXXVII 9, 27a, 51, 51a, 64.

Alice Rylance-Watson
March 2014

1
Dudley Costello, A Tour through the Valley of the Meuse, London 1846, p.186.
2
‘Crèvecoeur’, Belgian Castles, accessed 7 April 2014, http://www.belgiancastles.be/crevecoeur.html
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Distant Views of Bouvignes and the Castle of Crèvecoeur, Looking up the Meuse to Dinant 1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, March 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, April 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-distant-views-of-bouvignes-and-the-castle-of-crevecoeur-r1174442, accessed 05 January 2025.