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

Cecilia Powell has described this subject in detail, calling Burg Eltz, seen to the south in the middle distance left of centre, ‘a wonderfully preserved castle which lies about four miles from the [River] Mosel in a highly secluded spot roughly half way as the crow flies between Karden and Burg Bischofstein’ (see Tate D28966; Turner Bequest CCXCII 19, also in this subsection), where it ‘crowns an elliptical rock over two hundred feet high overlooking the narrow and tortuous valley of the Eltz, which joins the Mosel at Moselkern’.1 The viewpoint is near the ruins of Trutz Eltz (or Baldeneltz), seen in the foreground, ‘built on the hill immediately opposite’.2

Turner had not drawn the scene on his 1824 and 1839 Mosel tours, although he had made a written note of Burg Eltz among many other attractions on the first occasion, in the Rivers Meuse and Moselle sketchbook; see Alice Rylance-Watson’s entry for Tate D19564 (Turner Bequest CCXVI 7).3 Powell has noted that Turner stood at the ‘special viewing station’ built to afford ‘the unexpected experience of looking down upon the numerous turrets and gables of the castle as in a bird’s eye view’ (as still to be seen today among the heavily wooded hills); Turner’s friend and rival Clarkson Stanfield had used the same vantage point for a lithograph in his 1838 publication Sketches on the Moselle, the Rhine & the Meuse.4

D28955 (CCXCII 8) is a variant showing much the same scene from nearer to Trutz Eltz, without the repoussoir device of a dark stand of trees introduced here (below which may be a pale figure) but showing more of the crag in the foreground, expressing the chasm between the two castles with a more effective sense of precipitous height and corresponding depth and distance, although the carefully rendered view down to the valley floor on the right here is obscured there.

Turner apparently went back to Burg Eltz early in the 1840s, making at least five watercolours showing more conventionally dramatic views (private collections).5 For the full range of Mosel subjects associated with the present tour, see the Introduction to this subsection.

Technical notes:

There has been some fading to the yellow tones used in the background owing to prolonged display in the Fifth Loan Collection; the paper and colours are fresher at the edges, particularly at the right and along the bottom.

Cecilia Powell has noted this as one of the many sheets of grey 1829 Bally, Ellen and Steart paper used on Turner’s 1840 tour, neatly torn as eighths or sixteenths of the overall sheet, with dimensions of around 190 x 280 or 140 x 190 mm, and variously worked with pencil, watercolour and gouache; see the technical notes in the overall Introduction for others.1

Verso:

Blank; inscribed in pencil ‘108 | b’ centre; stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram over ‘CCXCII – 41’ towards bottom left; inscribed in pencil ‘D.28988’ towards bottom left.