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

This work is on medium weight, wove grey paper made by Bally, Ellan and Steart at the De Montalt Mill in Bath, Somerset. The paper has a ‘B E & S’ watermark, and countermark ‘1829’. Turner has applied thin washes of colour to the wet paper in broadly horizontal sweeps, and then sketched the topography very cursorily over the paint in graphite pencil. He worked up the foreground with more localised and more intensely coloured washes but no more drawing, and finally freely worked on the sky. Here he layered lead white gouache and then pale chrome yellow for the sunset, using the same technique as in his oil paintings, to maximise the brilliance of the pale yellow. Some of the thinnest areas of chrome yellow appear to have darkened. Turner was an early user of lead white in gouache, and by the middle of the nineteenth century other artists were also using it regularly. Lead white in scanty amounts of gum water as Turner used it, can easily discolour to a speckled or solid dark brown when it reacts with hydrogen sulphide gas, a common urban pollutant during the nineteenth century. Here, the chrome yellow may have behaved in the same way, since it is unevenly coloured now. The colour change begins in an extremely thin surface layer: in oil paints which can be sampled for cross-sections, such a layer is so very thin that it cannot be seen even with a high-quality optical microscope. Thinly applied layers of paint are more likely to reveal the change, because there is less unaltered material underneath. Chrome yellows were greatly mistrusted in Turner’s day on account of such colour changes, but in fact these changes can rarely be observed with certainty in his watercolours or oil paintings.

Scratching-out has been done with a soft point, in a few areas. White highlights in the foreground were applied in a rather insubstantial-looking white paint that probably is not based on lead white. Such paint, unprotected by other layers, would probably have darkened in the same way as the chrome yellow in the sky.

The other colours which Turner probably used are less likely to have changed in colour, although it is impossible to be certain of this when the edges have not been protected from light with a window mount. The other pigments identified by examination at low to moderate magnification include natural ultramarine, cobalt blue, vermilion and at least one red lake.

This view was identified by Cecilia Powell as a prospect from the slopes of the Dreifaltigkeitsberg (Holy Trinity hill) north of Regensburg in southern Germany, from near the eponymous Dreifaltigkeitskirche:

Turner made numerous pencil drawings around Regensburg in the contemporary Venice, Passau to Würzburg book; see under Tate D31311 (Turner Bequest CCCX 18a). Of these, D31352 (CCCX 39) is a loose sketch of the prospect from immediately outside the church.

As discussed in the technical notes below, the present study is one of seven of Regensburg and the nearby Walhalla monument at Donaustauf (see also Tate D32185, D34081, D34084–D34085, D34093, D36150; Turner Bequest CCCXVII 6, CCCXLI 360, 363, 364, 371, CCCLXIV 293) which were initially eighths of a single sheet; D36151 (CCCLXIV 294) is a related view on similar paper. D34081 is a slightly less detailed pencil outline from further back, showing the church in the left foreground, with a touch of white above the spire suggesting that Turner was thinking of developing it in colour with a similar early morning effect.

The subject was long misidentified as a view of Metz,2 on the River Moselle in north-east France, partly by comparison with a pencil sketch of the city from a cemetery with a similar cross in the foreground, in the 1839 Givet, Mézières, Verdun, Metz, Luxemburg and Trèves sketchbook (Tate D28221; Turner Bequest CCLXXXVIII 28);3 compare also Tate D24757 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 192), a related gouache on blue paper Noting the ‘praying figure’ among the memorials in the foreground here, Powell observed: ‘Turner’s perennial search for good viewpoints often led him, ...to hillsides and graveyards outside villages and towns’.4

Technical notes:

Thick, textured white gouache was combined with yellow to create the glowing morning sky by contrast with the cool grey paper. Before their subjects and dates had been firmly established, Andrew Wilton suggested a technical link between this composition among several ‘on the Rhine and at Botzen’ (Tate D36149–D36158; Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 292–301) and Venice subjects of 1840 on similar sheets;1 most of those works have since been confirmed as from this tour.

Among many such works on the blue or grey papers customarily used by Turner, this is one of seven originally from a single piece (subsequently scattered through Finberg’s 1909 Inventory, as listed above) to be identified by Cecilia Powell as showing subjects in and around Regensburg.2 They are from an 1829 sheet of the grey Bally, Ellen and Steart paper often used in 1840 (see the Introduction to the overall tour), and were temporarily reassembled for paper conservator Peter Bower’s 1999 Turner’s Later Papers exhibition, showing that their slightly irregular edges match exactly.3

Four subjects were drawn on one side, and three on the other, only one face of each eighth being used, with a last section unaccounted for. Bower has noted Turner’s habit of tearing such sheets, sometimes in advance or sometimes after making a sequence of sketches, unfolding and refolding the intact sheet as necessary.4 The delicate white chalk highlights on several, and the lively gouache and watercolour on three (noted in individual entries), was likely added once the sheets were separated, as suggested particularly by the colour having been freely worked up to the torn edges, with no sign of overlapping brushwork or adventitious splashes across originally neighbouring areas.

Verso:

Blank; inscribed in pencil ‘28’ centre, descending vertically; stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram over ‘CCCLXIV – 296’ bottom right.