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

The Porta Nigra is a Roman fortified gate located in the German city of Trier. Erected in the second century AD as the ‘Porta Martis’, the monument gained its present name, ‘Black Gate’, in the Middle Ages because of the gradual darkening and discolouration of the grey sandstone slabs with which it was built.1 The Porta Nigra was used as a church in the eleventh century, acquiring ‘numerous accretions and embellishments’ over the years, the art historian Cecilia Powell writes.2 By the time of Turner’s visit, however, ‘these had all been stripped away... under the Napoleonic regime’ and the Porta Nigra was once again used as a city gate.3

Upon visiting the monument during his six-week tour of the Meuse-Moselle region, the barrister and travel writer Bartholomew Stritch described the Porta Nigra as a ‘somber, imposing, and gigantic mass of masonry... built of immense blocks of stone, held together by bars of iron... in the form of a parallelogram’.4 Of all Trier’s Roman edifices and ruins, the Porta Nigra was the city’s ‘principal and most interesting’ destination for the gentlemen tourist with antiquarian interests.5

Turner’s drawing of Trier’s ancient monument is rendered in loose, translucent washes of grey, pink, and yellow pigment. This palette, and the naturally illuminating properties of watercolour, transforms this rather formidable and gloomy edifice into a painterly and aestheticised one.

This gouache of the Porta Nigra is based on a pencil sketch in the Trèves to Cochem and Coblenz to Mayence sketchbook of 1839 (Tate D28431; Turner Bequest CCXC 41). There are other, earlier drawings of the monument in the Trèves and Rhine sketchbook of 1824 (Tate D20141–D20142; Turner Bequest CCXVIII 3–4).

Verso:
Stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram and ‘CCXX–W’ towards bottom right; inscribed in pencil ‘10a’ at centre towards right and ‘Porta Nigra Trèves.’ at bottom.