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

Here Turner has inscribed a list of places on the ‘Right Bank’ of the Meuse from the Belgian town of Bouvignes to Maastricht in the Netherlands. Turner’s is in fact a list of places on the left bank; those on the right are inscribed on the folio opposite (Tate D19561; Turner Bequest CCXVI 5a). The artist has also made note of distances between some of the towns and cities listed.

The locations that this cataloguer has been able to transcribe are listed below, with an approximation of the real place names noted in brackets to the right of the transcription where necessary or possible.

Two of Turner’s inscriptions next to place names are worthy of note. The first: ‘city of Netherlands’ to the right of ‘Namur’. At the time of the artist’s 1824 tour, Namur had for nine years been incorporated into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, following Napoleon’s death and the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Belgium, however, was to break away from the Netherlands in 1830 as a result of its own revolution to establish an independent kingdom. Turner would visit Namur shortly after the Belgian Revolution in 1833, taking numerous sketches of the citadel there which had been of vital importance over centuries of invasion, besiegement, and colonisation (see Tate D29620–D29623; D29627–D29651; D29749–D29752; Turner Bequest CCXCVI 12a–14, 16–28, 78a–80).1 The second: ‘city of Westphalia’, an inscription to the right of ‘Liège’. Here Turner refers to the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, which belonged to the Lower Rhenish-Westphalian Circle of territories (or simply the ‘circle of Westphalia’) along with the Belgian province of Limburg.2