Boats travel slowly down the Rhine between the towns of Weissenthurm to the left, with its fifteenth-century tower, and Neuwied on the opposite bank. The Rhine was (and is still) a commercial river, but here Turner is interested in capturing a sense of atmosphere, space and sky. Mountains bleed and fuse into the air; a man wanders in the reeds to the left, and what appear to be the floats of fishing nets connect the banks.

This is one of fifty-one watercolours of the Rhine, painted by Turner following a tour in the summer of 1817. So rapid is the execution that these works were once assumed to have been painted on the spot, rather than worked up in the studio from pencil sketches, as is now accepted. Ruskin must have believed that Turner’s Rhine watercolours were painted in front of the motif when he wrote of them: ‘Every one of these sketches is the almost instantaneous rcord of an effect of colour or atmosphere, taken strictly from nature’.

On display is the full range of Turner’s techniques – washes, glazes, blotting, even scratching to reveal the grey paper below – there is a contrast between the brilliant flashiness of the execution and the eddying tranquillity of the scene. The watercolour is based on a pencil sketch on pages 78a and 79 of the Waterloo and Rhine sketchbook, part of the Turner Collection at Tate Britain.

The Rhine journey, possible only because of the ending of the Napoleonic wars, gave Turner the opportunity to study a long stretch of the river. Within two months of his return to England, Turner presented the whole series of watercolours to his patron Walter Fawkes, and received in return the sum of £500 guineas (about £50,000 in today’s money).

Exhibited: Sotheby’s (London), Watercolours from Winchester College, 1988, no. 18; Tate Gallery (later at Musée d’Ixelles, Brussels and Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn), Turner’s Rivers of Europe: The Rhine, Meuse and Mosel, 1991-1992, no. 5; Hôtel de Caumont, Aix-en-Provence (later at Turner Contemporary, Margate), Turner et la Couleur, 2016, no. 22

Literature: Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner (Freiburg, 1979), p. 376, no. 661; Luke Herrmann, ‘Picture Notes: Neuwied and Weissenthurm, 1817’, Turner Studies, 2:1 (Summer 1982), p. 55; John Gage, J.M.W. Turner: A Wonderful Range of Mind (New Haven and London, 1987), p. 45, pl. 66; Cecilia Powell, Turner’s Rivers of Europe: The Rhine, Meuse and Mosel (London, 1991), p. 100, no. 5, plate on p. 65; Anne-Isabelle Vannier (ed.), Turner et la Couleur (Paris, 2016), no. 22, p. 40; Charles Sinclair, ‘J.M.W. Turner, Neuwied and Weissenthurm, 1817’, in Richard Foster (ed.), Fifty Treasures from Winchester College (London, 2019), pp. 112–113

Provenance: Purchased from the artist by Walter Fawkes (1765–1829), by descent to the Reverend Ayscough Fawkes; Christie’s, London, 27 June 1890, lot 26; with Agnew’s, London until 1926; gift of Harry Collison, 1940