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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Venice, Austria and Southern Germany ... > Würzburg, Rhine and Ostend Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Mechelen (Malines) Cathedral and the Huis De Beyaert, from the Grote Markt 1840

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Mechelen (Malines) Cathedral and the Huis De Beyaert, from the Grote Markt’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 3 Verso:
Mechelen (Malines) Cathedral and the Huis De Beyaert, from the Grote Markt 1840
D30465
Turner Bequest CCCIII 3a
Pencil on flecked pale blue laid paper, 104 x 170 mm
Partial watermark: Tree of Liberty
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The drawing was made with the page turned horizontally. Finberg later correctly annotated his generic 1909 Inventory entry (‘Do. [i.e. ditto: Landscape, with church], &c.’) ‘do’, following on from his MS note of ‘Mechlin’ with reference to the related subject on the recto (D30464).1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy ‘Mechlin’ in full.2 This was the traditional English spelling of Mechelen (in Dutch, ‘Malines’ in French), a Flemish city north of Brussels and south of Antwerp, and one of the last stops on the 1840 tour (see the sketchbook’s Introduction).
The view here is north from the Grote Markt square, dominated by the ninety-seven metre (320 foot) tower of St Rumbold’s Cathedral, with its truncated spire. Below to the right of its south transept are loose indications of the intricate gables of the medieval Huis De Beyaert. There is a distant view of the tower, labelled ‘Malines’, in the 1817 Dort sketchbook (Tate D12997; Turner Bequest CLXII 1a).
The 1840 Mechelen sketches and a few others fall within a sequence of coastal views at Ostend, roughly seventy miles to the west, which marked the end of Turner’s long Continental itinerary; see under folio 1 recto (D30460).3

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
Undated MS note by Finberg (died 1939) in interleaved copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.978.
2
Undated MS note by Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.978.
3
See also Powell 1995, pp.72, 82 note 71, 246.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Mechelen (Malines) Cathedral and the Huis De Beyaert, from the Grote Markt 1840 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2018, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-mechelen-malines-cathedral-and-the-huis-de-beyaert-from-the-r1196225, accessed 05 July 2024.