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

This is one half of a double-page spread, the other being the paste-down inside the sketchbook’s back cover (D33675; Turner Bequest CCCXL 10). The two are precisely continuous, indicating that Turner drew this part on the verso of the last free leaf as then bound in the book.1 All the leaves were extracted and separated; some remaining inside the folded covers, others including this one being mounted and exhibited; a direct physical alignment of the two halves is therefore currently impracticable. In any case it may be that Turner decided to treat the present section independently, as it is worked up in fluid washes over the pencil outline, while D33675 was left untinted.

John Ruskin noted of this sketchbook, and doubtless of these pages: ‘One of the pencil sketches is a continuation of a coloured one on another leaf.’2 Cecilia Powell recognised the subject and its two-part aspect, albeit assigning variant titles in terms of the respective orientations, calling this part ‘Passau: View down the Danube’:3 ‘looking down the Danube to its confluence with the Inn (visible on the right) and the Ilz (hidden by the buildings on the left)’.4 The latter are part of the Oberhaus fortress, seen to the east, with the Niederhaus on the bank below, opposite the end of the Altstadt peninsula at the centre of the city, with the twin towers of St Michael’s Church, and the east end of St Stephen’s Cathedral, cut off at what was originally the gutter at the right. Above and between them on the south bank of the Inn are the twin Baroque spires of the Mariahilf church.

The viewpoint is a little west of where a viewing platform off the Unterer Längsweg path along the slopes below the Oberhaus provides a near-equivalent elevated prospect south over the Danube today, albeit obstructed to left and right by thick trees. This part of the scene is complemented by a more finished, atmospheric colour study of the confluence on another page (D33668; CCCXL 3), there seen from the north-east, overlooking the Ilzstadt beyond the mouth of the Ilz on the far side of the Oberhaus. Powell has described the present view as ‘no less magical, with its simple washes of pure colour set off by the whiteness of the page.’5

There is a similar (albeit disjointed) panoramic view from a little to the west in the contemporary Venice; Passau to Würzburg sketchbook (Tate D31409, D31411; Turner Bequest CCCX 67a, 68a). For other views of Passau from this tour, see the sketchbook’s Introduction.

Verso:

Blank; stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram over ‘CCCXL – 9’ bottom right.