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

There are two sketches of Beilstein here: the principal and largest view which runs across the page horizontally and a small squared-off composition at bottom left. Both depict the village surrounded by precipitous ranges and Turner has included in each Beilstein’s Burg Metternich and the Monastery Church of St Joseph. This sketch and those on folios 9 verso and 10 recto (Tate D28368–D28369; Turner Bequest CCXC 9a–10) formed the basis of a gouache and watercolour drawing on blue paper of c.1839 (Tate D29239; Turner Bequest CCXXI F).

As Cecilia Powell writes, here Turner has pictured Beilstein ‘from the most dramatic viewpoint of all, slightly upstream’.1 She points out that ‘a very similar view had been depicted by Clarkson Stanfield in his Studies on the Moselle (1838) and Turner probably sought his viewpoint out deliberately’.2

For further drawings of the Burg Metternich in this sketchbook see Tate D28364, D28365, D28366, D28527, D28528, D28537; Turner Bequest CCXC 7a, 8, 8a, 86a, 87, 91a. See also the First Mossel and Oxford sketchbook belonging to the same 1839 tour (Tate D28301, D28320, D28321; Turner Bequest CCLXXXIX 6a, 15a, 16).

For earlier sketches of the monument see the Rivers Meuse and Moselle and Moselle (or Rhine) sketchbooks of 1824 (Tate D19784, D19787, D19788, D19790, D19792, D20166, D20167; Turner Bequest CCXVI 117, 118a, 119, 120, 121, CCXIX 5, 6).