Winchester College owns the watercolour by J.M.W. Turner below. Watch the short video and read the article below to learn about it, including what it depicts and how it was painted.
J.M.W. Turner, the famous artist, made this depiction of the Rhine in around 1817. On the left bank, there is the eponymous fifteenth-century white tower of Weißenthurm (although it is a shadowy block in the watercolour), and slightly to the left of the tower, Hoch's monument. On the right bank, there is Neuwied, with a church spire. Boats sail along the Rhine. Note the translucency of their sails and how the lines in the reeds were created by scratching to reveal the grey paper underneath. Our eyes are drawn not to these details in the foreground, certainly not to the buildings on the banks, but to the flowing clouds and mountains in the background, the boundaries between which are greatly blurred; and to the small bird in the bottom right.
Watercolours are usually made quickly, often as a sketch. This makes the great detail of Turner's above highly impressive. At the National Galleries of Scotland, there is a similar watercolour also by Turner, depicted below. This version is more detailed (for example, a huntsman has been added in the bottom left) so presumably came after the one at Winchester College. Engravings were made of this version.
However, the watercolour at Winchester was not Turner's first depiction of the same scene: in other words, he most probably did not paint it en plein air. In fact, pencil sketches of the scene that Turner made whilst walking from Cologne to Mainz in August 1817 survive. There is little artistic merit to the sketches, one of which is pictured below, but they clearly depict the same landscape. Turner painted 51 watercolours from the sketches he made walking along the Rhine.
The watercolour was donated to Winchester College in 1940 by Harry Collison. Collison would have gone to Winchester College in the 1880s, but poor health prevented him from taking up his place. Fortunately, along with 108 other works, he donated the watercolour to the College just months before his house, where they had previously been kept, was directly hit by a bomb. The watercolour of Neuweid would have been particularly special to Collison because his father (who died in 1901) was educated by the Moravian Brethren nearby.
The watercolour is currently on display in the Winchester College Treasury as part of the exhibition, Views of Nature: Four Centuries of Watercolours from Winchester College. You can find the watercolour on Winchester College's Collections website and in 50 Treasures From Winchester College.
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