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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > The Second Meuse-Moselle Tour 1839 > First Mossel and Oxford Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Burg Bischofstein and the Pauluskapelle, from Below; Ehrenbreitstein from the Petersberg, with the Monument to General Marceau in the Foreground 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Burg Bischofstein and the Pauluskapelle, from Below; Ehrenbreitstein from the Petersberg, with the Monument to General Marceau in the Foreground’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 13 Verso:
Burg Bischofstein and the Pauluskapelle, from Below; Ehrenbreitstein from the Petersberg, with the Monument to General Marceau in the Foreground 1839
D28316
Turner Bequest CCLXXXIX 13 a
Pencil on white wove drawing paper, 235 x 140 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The uppermost, squared-off sketch is a view of the Burg Bischofstein which presides over the Moselle valley opposite the town of Burgen. The castle, identifiable by its tall cylindrical donjon tower and adjoining ruined chapel, was a stronghold of the Archbishops of Trier.1 Built in the late twelfth century and expanded in 1273, Bischofstein was later destroyed by the troops of Louis XIV of France during the Nine Years’ War.2 The medieval Pauluskapelle or Saint Paul’s Chapel can be seen below the castle (see Tate D28314; Turner Bequest CCLXXXIX 12a).
The remaining sketches are of Ehrenbreitstein, taken from the Petersburg at Koblenz. They show in the foreground the memorial to François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers (1769–1796), a distinguished French general of the Revolutionary army. The pyramidal monument was erected in honour of Marceau’s capture of Koblenz, the former refuge of the émigrés (members of the French aristocracy and gentry expelled during the Revolution). Marceau is remembered for his heroism during a siege at Altenkirchen where he was killed in action at just 27 years of age. Both Marceau and the monument to him are immortalised in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage of 1812–8 (Canto, III; LVI):
By Coblentz, on a rise of gentle ground,
There is a small and simple pyramid,
Crowning the summit of a verdant mound;
Beneath its base are heroes’ ashes hid,
Our enemy’s – but let not that forbid
Honour to Marceau! O’er whose early tomb
Tears, big tears, gush’d from the rough soldier’s lid,
Lamenting and yet envying such a doom,
Falling for France, whose rights he battled to resume.3
The monument appears again on the folio opposite (Tate D28317; Turner Bequest CCLXXXIX 14).

Alice Rylance-Watson
August 2013

1
‘Bischofstein’, Burgendatenbank des Europäischen Burgeninstitutes, Burgen an Rhein und Donau, http://www.ms-visucom.de/cgi-bin/ebidat.pl?id=135, accessed 9 August 2013.
2
Ibid.
3
George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Third, London 1816, p.33.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Burg Bischofstein and the Pauluskapelle, from Below; Ehrenbreitstein from the Petersberg, with the Monument to General Marceau in the Foreground 1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-burg-bischofstein-and-the-pauluskapelle-from-below-r1150597, accessed 21 November 2024.