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

This slight and swiftly rendered sketch of Treis was taken from Karden on the opposite bank of the Moselle. St John the Baptist’s Parish Church is seen at far right. It was still a relatively new construction by the time of Turner’s second tour of the Moselle, completed in 1831, to the designs of the Koblenz architect Johann Claudius von Lassaulx.1 At the left, located halfway up the slope of a mountain, is ‘the solitary chapel of Zills’ or the Zilleskapelle.2 The twelfth-century chapel appears on Tate D28557; Turner Bequest CCXCI 11 and also in a tiny sketch taken by Turner in the 1824 Rivers Meuse and Moselle sketchbook (Tate D19801; Turner Bequest CCXVI 125 a).