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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Venice, Austria and Southern Germany ... > Trieste, Graz and Danube Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner ?The Burgtor, Vienna 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘?The Burgtor, Vienna’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 10 Verso:
?The Burgtor, Vienna 1840
D30021
Turner Bequest CCXCIX 10a
Pencil on cream wove paper, 127 x 198 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘[?4]’ three times, below centre
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the page turned horizontally, this slight drawing was apparently made in haste, perhaps while passing the imposing structure on the left in a carriage; its relationship to the setting beyond to the right appears uncertain. Cecilia Powell has suggested it shows Vienna’s monumental classical Burgtor gateway;1 built in the 1820s it stands in the Heldenplatz near the Hofburg Palace.
Its south-western front includes five arches within its rusticated central third. These are visible through the corresponding section of the three-part Doric colonnade on the inner, north-eastern face, each part of which comprises four columns between massive corner piers. Turner appears to show five round arches, and seems to have written ‘4’ three times below the building.
For the few other Vienna views in this book, see under folio 40 recto (D30076).

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
See Powell 1995, p.242.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘?The Burgtor, Vienna 1840 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2018, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-burgtor-vienna-r1196871, accessed 21 November 2024.