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拍品专文
This luminous rendering of the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein is one of Turner’s great late masterpieces and one of only a small handful of major works by the artist to remain in private hands. Executed in 1835, it dates from Turner’s final and decisive creative period when his works are characterized by an increasingly effervescent palette, a progressively bold application of paint and a gradual deconstruction of form - all traits that directly inspired the Impressionist movement of the later 19th century and anticipated the Abstract Expressionism of the 20th century, leading to Turner often being described as the first ‘modern’ painter.
Turner first encountered the majestic, fortified castle of Ehrenbreitstein, perched high above Coblenz at the confluence of the Rivers Rhine and Mosel, in 1817 and revisited it on several subsequent tours of the continent. He was captivated by Germany’s variable and at times sublime terrain, which he explored over a period of nearly thirty years, executing hundreds of pencil sketches and watercolors, but only six oil paintings. This is the only oil of a German subject remaining in private ownership, the others now hang at The Frick Collection, Yale Centre for British Art, Tate Britain and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Based on en plein air pencil sketches that he made during his third tour of the Rhine in 1833, this painting was intended to be engraved as a large single plate by his close friend John Pye, in order that Turner’s image might reach as wide an audience as possible. Printmaking was an integral part of Turner’s artistic production and a key means of popularizing his art and establishing his contemporary celebrity. The painting elicited huge critical acclaim following its public exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1835, when Turner extended the official title with lines from a popular, epic narrative poem - Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage - by the greatest British Romantic poet of the age, Lord Byron. Ehrenbreitstein was bought directly from Turner’s studio by Elhanan Bicknell, one of the artist’s greatest and most significant late patrons, and has only appeared on the market three times in the nearly two hundred years since it was created.
Turner’s Ehrenbreitstein: an appreciation by Ian Warrell
Although Turner painted numerous watercolors during his extensive explorations of Germany between 1817 and 1844, this is one of only a handful of German subjects that he painted in oils. Created and first exhibited in 1835, in the last flourish of Turner’s artistic development, the picture is characterized by luxurious vibrant colors and a hazy imprecision, both features that then often provoked controversy or outrage, and which paved the way for the further revelations in representation by the French Impressionists more than thirty years later. At the same time, the picture is a profound fusion of Romantic sentiment and aesthetics, clothing the poetry of Lord Byron at his most elegiac with Turner’s atmospheric style.
The Fortress and Marceau, 'Freedom's Champion'
The subject here arose from Turner’s European travels which, once peace was established following the Battle of Waterloo, took him first to Germany in August 1817, rather than to the famous Italian haunts of the standard Grand Tour. He was, of course, curious to visit the celebrated battlefield outside Brussels, but quickly pushed on eastwards to Cologne, so that he could hike steadily up the Rhine as far as Mainz. He then retraced his route down river by boat before heading home via the Netherlands. This gave him two opportunities to study the towering grandeur of the fortifications of Ehrenbreitstein, which even in their ruined state commanded the cliffs rising up on the east side of the Rhine at its confluence with the river Mosel, facing the city of Coblenz (see Cecilia Powell, Turner’s Rivers of Europe: The Rhine, Meuse and Mosel, 1991, pp.26-36, fig.18).
The natural strategic advantages of this site had first been exploited many centuries before the Romans constructed a fort there in the third century A.D., and by the time of Charlemagne’s rule at nearby Aachen, at the start of the ninth century, the inhabitants at Ehrenbreitstein ensured control of the intersection of these important trans-European rivers for military or trading purposes. By the mid-twelfth century fortifications had been constructed by the Archbishop of Trier. Inevitably the shifting geopolitics around Ehrenbreitstein’s position over succeeding centuries meant it was a much-contested vantage point.
During Turner’s lifetime, troops of the French Revolutionary Army captured Coblenz in 1794 but failed to dislodge the Prussians garrisons occupying Ehrenbreitstein. Over the following years the siege continued, and among the valiant French attackers was the dashing young General François-Sévérine Marceau-Desgraviers (1769–1796;). Marceau had gained heroic status as ‘Freedom’s Champion’ for his role, as a daring twenty-year old, in the storming of the Bastille. Tragically in 1796, a couple of years after his promotion to commander of the First Division of the Armée de Sambre-et-Meuse, he was severely wounded by an Austrian marksman and abandoned following the Battle of Altenkirchen, to the north of Ehrenbreitstein. Despite attempts to revive him by the Austrians, Marceau died and his body was ceremoniously returned to the French. The loss of this great hero was deeply felt, occasioning the transport of his body back to Coblenz with an escort of two thousand soldiers. Once there his funeral was marked by the firing of a salute from his French comrades that was echoed by the Austrians stationed nearby. A commemorative pyramidal monument was afterwards designed by General Jean-Baptiste Kléber to contain Marceau’s ashes (see the design in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
All of this was memorialized by Lord Byron anything that can be identified as a preliminary idea for the painting. More certainly, there are sketches of the monument, with the silhouette of Ehrenbreitstein beyond in a book used in 1839, four years after the picture was exhibited, as if Turner was refreshing his recollections of a favorite subject in the wake of exhibiting the painting (Tate; TB CCLXXXIX, ‘First Mossel and Oxford’ sketchbook). In the standard catalogue raisonné of Turner’s paintings Evelyn Joll suggested the source of the composition may well be a large, folded sheet with sixteen sketches recorded in and around Coblenz and Ehrenbreitstein (Tate; TB CCCXLIV 1-16). These are all set down in the perfunctory, hasty manner Turner deployed by the 1830s, perhaps in 1833, so Turner would also have needed to refer to his more precise earlier sketches when delineating the fortifications. And, indeed, he shows the ruined buildings in the painting as they were on his first visit, before the process of demolition and reconstruction got under way in subsequent years. A fascinating comparison can be made with his watercolor of circa 1819-20, now at Bury Art Museum (Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, Fribourg 1979, no.687).
Turner and John Pye's engraving
The latter watercolor of Ehrenbreistein was engraved by James Baylis Allen (1803-76) as a single plate in 1824 (Rawlinson no.202). But just a few years later a smaller engraved version of the same image was produced for the popular annual The Literary Souvenir (1829) by the seasoned engraver John Pye (1782-1874). In his celebrated 1811 engraving of Turner’s picture of Pope’s Villa (R.76), Pye dramatically transformed the artist’s ideas of the possibilities of recreating nuances of light and shade in black and white line-engraved reproductions of his paintings. He had subsequently worked on Turner’s designs for James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour in Italy (1818-20) and the History of Richmondshire (1818-23). During 1827-8, while he was working on the reduced Ehrenbreitstein subject (R.317a), Pye had also been finishing a large engraving of Turner’s The Temple of Jupiter Panhellenius in the Island of Aegina (1828; R.208). These overlapping projects seem to have stimulated Pye to request a collaboration with Turner on a further large plate a few years later, following a further partnership on a couple of the vignette images in the hugely successful illustrated edition of Rogers’s extended poem Italy (1830).
Dr Jan Piggott has drawn attention to an engraving of General Marceau’s Tomb by Pye, based on a work by William Watts, which was published in 1830. The image is accompanied by Byron’s tribute to the fallen hero, and all of this could imply that the subject selected for the partnership was one that Pye suggested, rather than Turner himself. In any case, Turner was already meeting the demand for images connected with Byron, who had died comparatively recently in 1824. Juggling work for Sir Walter Scott too, by 1832 Turner was immersed in creating watercolor designs for Edward Finden’s Landscape Illustrations to Mr Murray’s First and Complete and Uniform Edition of the Life and Works of Lord Byron (1832-33: R.406-431; see David Blayney Brown, Turner and Byron, 1992, pp.36-7, 93-4 and 99ff).
As the 1830s progressed a succession of Turner’s exhibited oil paintings was engraved as large individual plates for a new market, which was otherwise dominated by colleagues such as Sir David Wilkie and Edwin Landseer. Artists generally retained the copyright to their images or sold it to whoever acquired the actual painting. But the considerable and uncertain investment in undertaking the process of engraving, promoting, and distributing the resulting prints usually rested with the engraver or publisher. This necessitated negotiating terms with Turner, who was notorious as a sharp businessman. So rather than evolving as a coherent series, as it is sometimes suggested, the origins of the large prints of Turner’s images were a piecemeal process, which appears to have been set in train by Pye’s initiative in securing rights to work on this view of Ehrenbreitstein.
According to the correspondence surviving in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Pye believed that the proposal for the new Ehrenbreitstein subject had been agreed to by both parties and involved Turner producing a watercolor that would be engraved as a roughly 14 by 17 1⁄8 inch plate (i.e., 35.5 x 43.6 cm.; the same size as a view of Rotterdam recently engraved by Cooke). Pye had envisaged that the medium of watercolor would make it easier to transport abroad, to enable him to continue working on the engraving process while staying with his daughter (see Cecila Powell, Turner and Germany, 1995, pp.181-3). To his surprise, however, Turner produced the present oil painting instead, in his preferred standard format, which caused Pye much consternation, disrupting the schedule he had formulated. Nevertheless, he must have been relieved by the quality of the painting, which was confirmed by the untypically warm response it generated as one of Turner’s five knock-out exhibits at the Royal Academy exhibition in May 1835. All of the other paintings are now cherished ‘icons’ in their respective museum collections: Keelmen heaving in Coals by Night (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C; B&J 360); Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; B&J 362); Line Fishing off Hastings (Victoria and Albert Museum, London; B&J 363); and Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16th, 1834 (Philadelphia Museum of Art; B&J 359).
Ehrenbreitstein and Byron
Turner’s title for his German subject brought together his own experience of Ehrenbreitstein with a conflated evocation of Byron’s celebrated lines about Marceau’s tomb. He embraced a mistranslation of ‘breitstein’ as ‘Bright stone’ (instead of ‘broad stone’) as an excuse to revel in the brighter tonal keys of his palette. Turner was evidently already alert to the way the late afternoon and evening light played across the craggy heights of the fortress, creating subtly shifting swatches of color. He would explore this tangibly in a series of playfully evocative watercolor studies of Ehrenbreitstein during his visit in 1841, on the same journey that he began his meditations on the way light changed the character of Mount Rigi on Lake Lucerne – most notably in the sunrise view known as The Blue Rigi (1842, Tate Britain). Remarkably, however, Turner achieved much the same sumptuous effect here six years earlier than those famous watercolors, sculpting the great riverside bluff with flickering passages of salmon pink and shimmering white.
In addition to his title, Turner appended an edited version of stanzas LVI to LVIII of Byron’s poem in the Royal Academy catalogue. However, the type-setters, or the exhibition committee clipped his submitted text of its last three lines:
‘By Coblentz, on a rise of gentle ground, [from stanza LVI]
There is small and simple pyramid,
Crowning the summit of the verdant mound;
Beneath its base are heroes’ ashes hid,
Our enemy’s – but let not that forbid
Honour to Marceau! --------------
--------------He was freedom’s champion! [from stanza LVII]
Here Ehrenbreitstein, with her shattered wall, [from stanza LVIII]
Yet shows of what she was …
But Peace destroyed what war could never blight,
And laid those proud roofs bare to Summer’s rain –
On which the iron shower for years had pour’d in vain’
Contemporary critical reception
In comparison with previous and succeeding years, the response from the press in 1835 was moderate and somewhat favorable. Some critics, like that of the Observer admired his ‘sober pieces’ as ‘very beautiful’ but felt that his work had generally been ‘over-rated, particularly by Artists, for the public invariably laugh at his late pictures, considering him the only R.A. that has any genuine farcical humor in him’ (17 May). Turner’s bold and unconventional stylistic departures also tested the columnist of the Examiner, who conceded, ‘We still think him the first landscape painter in the world … In imagination, no one, ancient or modern, at all approaches him. His invention, too, his light and shade, and his divine aerial distances, are unequalled. But everything shall be at once surrendered for the sake of some tawdriness or trick!’ (10 May). Just as bewildered were visiting foreign critics Gustave Planche (writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes) and Gustav Friedrich Waagen (in his subsequent Works of Art and Artists in England, 1838), who both found it difficult to reconcile the exquisite monochrome engravings they knew of Turner’s images with the loose and spirited handling of paint and the expressive coloring that had become the norm at this stage of the artist’s life.
The majority of the local critics, however, were more habituated to what was seen as Turner’s wayward individualism and offered more appreciative opinions of The Bright Stone of Honour. Even the Times, for example, considered its ‘force of colors and the admirable harmony of tone are not to be equaled by any living artist’ (23 May). Fraser’s Magazine, meanwhile, judged Ehrenbreitstein as ‘beautiful’, in contrast to Keelmen heaving in Coals by Night, which it believed to be a ‘failure’. Yet more emphatic praise appeared in both the Spectator (8 May) and the Athenaeum (23 May). The former saluted the transcendence of Turner’s landscapes, describing the present work as ‘a poetical view on the Rhine, showing the rock of Ehrenbreitstein burnished with the bright golden rays of sunset. The tomb of Marceau is in the middle distance; and we scarcely need the quotation from BYRON to make us feel the force of this association of his fame with “the bright stone of honour”. It is a splendid tribute of genius to one of the champions of freedom.’ Building on this, the Athenaeum’s critic enthused, ‘Imagination and reality strive for mastery in this noble picture: there is an aerial splendor about it, such as the poetic love, and at the same time such a truthful representation of the real scene, as satisfies those who conceive that a landscape should be laid down with the accuracy of a district survey.’ If further endorsement were needed, Turner’s colleague and sometime rival, John Constable wrote to a friend with his exacting judgments on the 1835 exhibition, in which he marveled that ‘Turner’s light, whether it emanates from sun or moon, is exquisite’ (6 June).
In fact, in The Bright Stone of Honour, Constable would have been able to relish Turner’s realization of both sun and moonlight. Like the quotation appended to the picture’s title, this effect was also prompted by an evocative passage by Byron, this time from Canto 4 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818):
‘The moon is up, and yet it is not night;
Sunset divides the day with her.’
The dual effect was afterwards a crucial feature of Turner’s final Roman and Venetian subjects, as well as defining his masterpiece The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth, 1838 (1839; London, National Gallery). But it is exciting to see Turner adumbrate here such a charged poetic concept so hauntingly and with such delicacy.
Surprisingly, the painting did not attract a buyer at the 1835 exhibition, possibly because of the contracted engraving by Pye, who was still at work on his plate in 1844, when the picture greatly impressed John Ruskin. In his diary he was thrilled to have seen ‘the finest Turner I have come across for many a day – the Ehrenbreitstein.’ (2 March 1844). Working proofs of Pye’s engraving were at last pulled the following year, but it was not until 1846 that a full run was printed and issued. The result is a really fine translation (Turner’s preferred term) of the image. However, in accordance with contemporary taste, the print makes solid what is airy and mysteriously intangible in the painting, resolving and clarifying where paint alone is suggestive and simultaneously insubstantial. Yet the contrast is helpful and instructive, confirming in each detail what is so radical, so modern and so distinctive about the imprint of Turner’s hand on every part of the actual canvas.
A note on Ehrenbreitstein’s provenance
One of Turner’s most important patrons, Elhanan Bicknell formed a remarkable collection of works by the artist, consisting of twelve oil paintings and eighteen watercolors, all of which were acquired between 1838 and 1854. The son of a Unitarian cloth manufacturer turned school master, Bicknell was offered a partnership in his uncle's refinery of whale-produced spermacci, leading to a substantial financial interest in the Pacific whaling industry. By 1832, he had enough money to start collecting in the relatively unexplored field of contemporary British art, a taste far from that for the Old Masters, which had dominated the art world at the beginning of the century. His indifference towards the European school of painting was made plain in his famous remark, following a visit to Italy, that he had seen nothing he would 'give a damn for'. Bicknell’s subsequent collecting reveals equally decided views on English art; he owned several works by Gainsborough but nothing by Reynolds or, surprisingly, Constable, despite being related to the latter’s wife Maria Bicknell. He bought his first seven watercolors by Turner in 1838. In 1841, by which time Turner is known to have attended dinners at Bicknell's house in Herne Hill, South London, the latter had acquired the artist’s dazzling oil of the Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio at the Royal Academy (1841; Christie's, New York, 6 April 2006, lot 97, sold for $32,000,000; private collection). This was followed up by his commissioning of a companion piece: Campo Santo, Venice (Toledo, Toledo Museum of Art), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1842, the same year he bought The Blue Rigi, Sunrise (1842; London, Tate Britain), a watercolor from the celebrated series depicting the Swiss Alpine mountain that arguably represents the peak of Turner’s achievement in that medium. Bicknell’s collecting reached its apogee in 1844, the year in which he purchased no fewer than eight oils by Turner – including six on a single day - notably the monumental Palestrina (1828; London, Tate), Antwerp: Van Goyen Looking Out for a Subject (1833; New York, Frick Collection) and the present lot. He went on to buy two early oil paintings in 1851 and four more watercolors in 1854, after Turner's death. Following Bicknell’s death in 1861 his collection was put up for sale at Christie’s. Before the pictures were sent to King Street, the collection was opened to the public at Herne Hill where it excited such interest from artists, connoisseurs, and visitors that there was often ‘a line of carriages stretching more than a mile from the house.’ When the works eventually arrived at Christie’s for the six-day sale in April 1863, Bicknell’s remarkable procession of Turner oils were hung on a single wall, with the canvases of Palestrina and Ehrenbreitstein occupying the central position. In a piece printed on 28th April, The Star described the collection as one that 'would have done no discredit to a LORENZO the MAGNIFICENT' (for a full account of Bicknell, his collection and relationship with Turner, see Bicknell and Guiterman, 1987, op. cit., p. 34-44).
The present picture was acquired at the Bicknell sale by Agnew’s on behalf of Ralph Brocklebank, the scion of the eponymous shipping line. One of the oldest merchant shipping companies in the world, it was started by Daniel Brocklebank, a shipbuilder from Maine who founded the shipyard in Whitehaven, Cumberland, in 1785. Ralph Brocklebank, who lived at Childwall Hall, Liverpool, was a notable collector of pictures by British artists. In addition to Ehrenbreitstein, he owned Turner’s Somer-Hill, near Tunbridge (1811; Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland), The Beacon Light (1835-40; Cardiff, National Museum Cardiff), and The Grand Canal, Venice (1837; San Marino, The Huntington), known then as The Marriage of the Adriatic, which he bought from Agnew’s in 1874 and had been one of the star lots from the collection of John Ruskin, Turner’s friend and greatest champion.
Wentworth Beaumont, 2nd Viscount Allendale, acquired Ehrenbreitstein, again through Agnew’s, when it was sold by Brocklebank’s grandson in 1942. Allendale, who came from a long line of distinguished collectors, had sold his most celebrated picture, Giorgione’s Adoration of the Shepherds, also known as the Allendale Nativity (c.1505-10; Washington, National Gallery of Art), only five years previously but still owned such masterpieces as Jan Steen’s The Effects of Intemperance (1663-5; London, National Gallery) and Claude’s Landscape with Saint Philip baptizing the Eunuch (1678; Cardiff, National Museum Cardiff), a work that Turner himself would have greatly admired.
Turner, The Father of Modern Art
In 1835, the year in which Ehrenbreitstein was painted, Turner turned sixty. The work Turner produced during the remaining sixteen years of his life is now considered by many to be his supreme achievement, anticipating movements from Impressionism to abstract Expressionism and continuing to loom large over the artistic psyche of subsequent generations. Turner’s output from this period broke from the conventions of the time, leading his critics to denounce him as deranged. His revolutionary use of color and abstraction of subject in the genre of landscape painting paved the way for the radical movements that dominated the next century, influencing such artistic luminaries as Whistler, Monet, Rothko and Twombly.
After visiting the National Gallery in London in 1875, the artist Berthe Morisot wrote, ‘I saw many Turners. Whistler, whom we liked so much, imitates him a great deal’. Largely due to his long-standing and infamous feud with John Ruskin, Whistler was reluctant to concede his debt to Turner despite the profusion of evidence, not only in the atmospheric effects learnt from studying Turner’s late watercolors, but also in his choice of subjects, such as the River Thames in London and, later, the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.
It was no coincidence that both landmarks were later taken up with comparable energy by Claude Monet (1840-1926), who first encountered Turner’s work on a visit to London in 1870-71. Scholars have long noted the debt to Turner in Monet's Impression, Sunrise (1872-3; Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet), a work that has come to be seen as a manifesto for the Impressionist movement. Monet's subsequent variations on a single theme, seeking to capture the same subject under the transient effects of light and atmosphere, was a practice anticipated in Turner's serial watercolors, which the French painter had studied during his visits to the National Gallery while in London. This is particularly true of Monet’s later series of canvases - begun in 1900 - depicting the Houses of Parliament, compositions ultimately rooted in Turner’s magisterial The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834 (Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art). The critic Gustave Geffroy, a close friend of the French painter, noted in 1891 that Monet and Pissarro had returned from a trip to London ‘with the dazzling experience of the great Turner in their eyes’ (G. Geffroy, Claude Monet, sa vie, son temps, son oeuvre, Paris, 1892, p. 64). Interestingly, as with Whistler - albeit for different reasons - Monet sought to distance himself from Turner's influence, chiefly due to the Impressionists’ desire to establish their artistic lineage in French soil. However, Turner's art would be an inescapable point of reference for Monet and his contemporaries as they explored the possibilities of a form of landscape painting largely defined by color. The fiery palette with which Monet describes the effects of the setting sun in San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk (1908; Cardiff, National Museum Cardiff) recalls Turner’s earlier watercolors of the island and his canvas of The Dogana, San Giorgio, Citella, from the Steps of the Europa (1842; London, Tate Britain).
Turner’s influence extended deep into the 20th century, informing the painting of the American abstract Expressionists, notably Mark Rothko (1903-1970). On seeing Turner’s work on trips to Europe in the late 1950s and 60s, Rothko was drawn to the simplicity and communicational force of Turner’s late period, the essence of what the American was trying to achieve in his own work. It was during a visit to Lawrence Gowing’s seminal Museum of Modern Art exhibition in 1966, Turner: Imagination and Reality, that Rothko made his much-quoted remark, “This man Turner, he learnt a lot from me”. Such was his admiration for the British painter that, in 1969, the year before his death, Rothko donated the Seagram Murals to the Tate Gallery - the remarkable series of nine canvases originally intended for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York – in the hope they would be hung alongside Turner’s bequest to the nation (London, Tate Modern). The 1966 exhibition included a substantial number of unfinished paintings and watercolors, works that amplified the sense that Turner had ‘reached out into the borderland between representation and the abstract’ (M. Wheeler, in L. Gowing, Turner: Imagination and Reality, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1966, p. 5.).
Although Cy Twombly’s admiration for Turner has been well documented, it wasn’t until the 2011-12 exhibition: Turner Monet Twombly that the connection was examined more rigorously. In the exhibition catalogue Jeremy Lewison noted that Twombly’s Study from the Temeraire (1998-99; Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales) – a monumental triptych painted in response to Turner’s 1838 masterpiece in London’s National Gallery – was one of many by the American that are linked to certain late works by Turner through their exploration of ‘mortality, nostalgia, loss and mourning’ (Turner Monet Twombly. Later Paintings, London, 2011, p. 14). Although Twombly, a self-proclaimed ‘Romantic Symbolist’, was undoubtedly drawn to Turner’s facture; the raw, heavily impastoed surfaces that would inspire his own expressive canvases, it was also the British painter’s poeticism that attracted the American. Twombly’s lifelong act of inscribing words onto his paintings, used to extend his frame of reference, follows Turner’s own predilection for publishing verse in exhibition catalogues, as was the case with Ehrenbreitstein and its accompanying lines from Byron, a poet both artists deeply admired. Twombly’s desire to feel a closer connection with his artistic predecessors, beyond a shared pictorial doctrine, is evident in the collection of letters assembled during the American’s lifetime, including one written by Turner in 1813.
Turner first encountered the majestic, fortified castle of Ehrenbreitstein, perched high above Coblenz at the confluence of the Rivers Rhine and Mosel, in 1817 and revisited it on several subsequent tours of the continent. He was captivated by Germany’s variable and at times sublime terrain, which he explored over a period of nearly thirty years, executing hundreds of pencil sketches and watercolors, but only six oil paintings. This is the only oil of a German subject remaining in private ownership, the others now hang at The Frick Collection, Yale Centre for British Art, Tate Britain and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Based on en plein air pencil sketches that he made during his third tour of the Rhine in 1833, this painting was intended to be engraved as a large single plate by his close friend John Pye, in order that Turner’s image might reach as wide an audience as possible. Printmaking was an integral part of Turner’s artistic production and a key means of popularizing his art and establishing his contemporary celebrity. The painting elicited huge critical acclaim following its public exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1835, when Turner extended the official title with lines from a popular, epic narrative poem - Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage - by the greatest British Romantic poet of the age, Lord Byron. Ehrenbreitstein was bought directly from Turner’s studio by Elhanan Bicknell, one of the artist’s greatest and most significant late patrons, and has only appeared on the market three times in the nearly two hundred years since it was created.
Turner’s Ehrenbreitstein: an appreciation by Ian Warrell
Although Turner painted numerous watercolors during his extensive explorations of Germany between 1817 and 1844, this is one of only a handful of German subjects that he painted in oils. Created and first exhibited in 1835, in the last flourish of Turner’s artistic development, the picture is characterized by luxurious vibrant colors and a hazy imprecision, both features that then often provoked controversy or outrage, and which paved the way for the further revelations in representation by the French Impressionists more than thirty years later. At the same time, the picture is a profound fusion of Romantic sentiment and aesthetics, clothing the poetry of Lord Byron at his most elegiac with Turner’s atmospheric style.
The Fortress and Marceau, 'Freedom's Champion'
The subject here arose from Turner’s European travels which, once peace was established following the Battle of Waterloo, took him first to Germany in August 1817, rather than to the famous Italian haunts of the standard Grand Tour. He was, of course, curious to visit the celebrated battlefield outside Brussels, but quickly pushed on eastwards to Cologne, so that he could hike steadily up the Rhine as far as Mainz. He then retraced his route down river by boat before heading home via the Netherlands. This gave him two opportunities to study the towering grandeur of the fortifications of Ehrenbreitstein, which even in their ruined state commanded the cliffs rising up on the east side of the Rhine at its confluence with the river Mosel, facing the city of Coblenz (see Cecilia Powell, Turner’s Rivers of Europe: The Rhine, Meuse and Mosel, 1991, pp.26-36, fig.18).
The natural strategic advantages of this site had first been exploited many centuries before the Romans constructed a fort there in the third century A.D., and by the time of Charlemagne’s rule at nearby Aachen, at the start of the ninth century, the inhabitants at Ehrenbreitstein ensured control of the intersection of these important trans-European rivers for military or trading purposes. By the mid-twelfth century fortifications had been constructed by the Archbishop of Trier. Inevitably the shifting geopolitics around Ehrenbreitstein’s position over succeeding centuries meant it was a much-contested vantage point.
During Turner’s lifetime, troops of the French Revolutionary Army captured Coblenz in 1794 but failed to dislodge the Prussians garrisons occupying Ehrenbreitstein. Over the following years the siege continued, and among the valiant French attackers was the dashing young General François-Sévérine Marceau-Desgraviers (1769–1796;). Marceau had gained heroic status as ‘Freedom’s Champion’ for his role, as a daring twenty-year old, in the storming of the Bastille. Tragically in 1796, a couple of years after his promotion to commander of the First Division of the Armée de Sambre-et-Meuse, he was severely wounded by an Austrian marksman and abandoned following the Battle of Altenkirchen, to the north of Ehrenbreitstein. Despite attempts to revive him by the Austrians, Marceau died and his body was ceremoniously returned to the French. The loss of this great hero was deeply felt, occasioning the transport of his body back to Coblenz with an escort of two thousand soldiers. Once there his funeral was marked by the firing of a salute from his French comrades that was echoed by the Austrians stationed nearby. A commemorative pyramidal monument was afterwards designed by General Jean-Baptiste Kléber to contain Marceau’s ashes (see the design in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
All of this was memorialized by Lord Byron anything that can be identified as a preliminary idea for the painting. More certainly, there are sketches of the monument, with the silhouette of Ehrenbreitstein beyond in a book used in 1839, four years after the picture was exhibited, as if Turner was refreshing his recollections of a favorite subject in the wake of exhibiting the painting (Tate; TB CCLXXXIX, ‘First Mossel and Oxford’ sketchbook). In the standard catalogue raisonné of Turner’s paintings Evelyn Joll suggested the source of the composition may well be a large, folded sheet with sixteen sketches recorded in and around Coblenz and Ehrenbreitstein (Tate; TB CCCXLIV 1-16). These are all set down in the perfunctory, hasty manner Turner deployed by the 1830s, perhaps in 1833, so Turner would also have needed to refer to his more precise earlier sketches when delineating the fortifications. And, indeed, he shows the ruined buildings in the painting as they were on his first visit, before the process of demolition and reconstruction got under way in subsequent years. A fascinating comparison can be made with his watercolor of circa 1819-20, now at Bury Art Museum (Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, Fribourg 1979, no.687).
Turner and John Pye's engraving
The latter watercolor of Ehrenbreistein was engraved by James Baylis Allen (1803-76) as a single plate in 1824 (Rawlinson no.202). But just a few years later a smaller engraved version of the same image was produced for the popular annual The Literary Souvenir (1829) by the seasoned engraver John Pye (1782-1874). In his celebrated 1811 engraving of Turner’s picture of Pope’s Villa (R.76), Pye dramatically transformed the artist’s ideas of the possibilities of recreating nuances of light and shade in black and white line-engraved reproductions of his paintings. He had subsequently worked on Turner’s designs for James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour in Italy (1818-20) and the History of Richmondshire (1818-23). During 1827-8, while he was working on the reduced Ehrenbreitstein subject (R.317a), Pye had also been finishing a large engraving of Turner’s The Temple of Jupiter Panhellenius in the Island of Aegina (1828; R.208). These overlapping projects seem to have stimulated Pye to request a collaboration with Turner on a further large plate a few years later, following a further partnership on a couple of the vignette images in the hugely successful illustrated edition of Rogers’s extended poem Italy (1830).
Dr Jan Piggott has drawn attention to an engraving of General Marceau’s Tomb by Pye, based on a work by William Watts, which was published in 1830. The image is accompanied by Byron’s tribute to the fallen hero, and all of this could imply that the subject selected for the partnership was one that Pye suggested, rather than Turner himself. In any case, Turner was already meeting the demand for images connected with Byron, who had died comparatively recently in 1824. Juggling work for Sir Walter Scott too, by 1832 Turner was immersed in creating watercolor designs for Edward Finden’s Landscape Illustrations to Mr Murray’s First and Complete and Uniform Edition of the Life and Works of Lord Byron (1832-33: R.406-431; see David Blayney Brown, Turner and Byron, 1992, pp.36-7, 93-4 and 99ff).
As the 1830s progressed a succession of Turner’s exhibited oil paintings was engraved as large individual plates for a new market, which was otherwise dominated by colleagues such as Sir David Wilkie and Edwin Landseer. Artists generally retained the copyright to their images or sold it to whoever acquired the actual painting. But the considerable and uncertain investment in undertaking the process of engraving, promoting, and distributing the resulting prints usually rested with the engraver or publisher. This necessitated negotiating terms with Turner, who was notorious as a sharp businessman. So rather than evolving as a coherent series, as it is sometimes suggested, the origins of the large prints of Turner’s images were a piecemeal process, which appears to have been set in train by Pye’s initiative in securing rights to work on this view of Ehrenbreitstein.
According to the correspondence surviving in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Pye believed that the proposal for the new Ehrenbreitstein subject had been agreed to by both parties and involved Turner producing a watercolor that would be engraved as a roughly 14 by 17 1⁄8 inch plate (i.e., 35.5 x 43.6 cm.; the same size as a view of Rotterdam recently engraved by Cooke). Pye had envisaged that the medium of watercolor would make it easier to transport abroad, to enable him to continue working on the engraving process while staying with his daughter (see Cecila Powell, Turner and Germany, 1995, pp.181-3). To his surprise, however, Turner produced the present oil painting instead, in his preferred standard format, which caused Pye much consternation, disrupting the schedule he had formulated. Nevertheless, he must have been relieved by the quality of the painting, which was confirmed by the untypically warm response it generated as one of Turner’s five knock-out exhibits at the Royal Academy exhibition in May 1835. All of the other paintings are now cherished ‘icons’ in their respective museum collections: Keelmen heaving in Coals by Night (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C; B&J 360); Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; B&J 362); Line Fishing off Hastings (Victoria and Albert Museum, London; B&J 363); and Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16th, 1834 (Philadelphia Museum of Art; B&J 359).
Ehrenbreitstein and Byron
Turner’s title for his German subject brought together his own experience of Ehrenbreitstein with a conflated evocation of Byron’s celebrated lines about Marceau’s tomb. He embraced a mistranslation of ‘breitstein’ as ‘Bright stone’ (instead of ‘broad stone’) as an excuse to revel in the brighter tonal keys of his palette. Turner was evidently already alert to the way the late afternoon and evening light played across the craggy heights of the fortress, creating subtly shifting swatches of color. He would explore this tangibly in a series of playfully evocative watercolor studies of Ehrenbreitstein during his visit in 1841, on the same journey that he began his meditations on the way light changed the character of Mount Rigi on Lake Lucerne – most notably in the sunrise view known as The Blue Rigi (1842, Tate Britain). Remarkably, however, Turner achieved much the same sumptuous effect here six years earlier than those famous watercolors, sculpting the great riverside bluff with flickering passages of salmon pink and shimmering white.
In addition to his title, Turner appended an edited version of stanzas LVI to LVIII of Byron’s poem in the Royal Academy catalogue. However, the type-setters, or the exhibition committee clipped his submitted text of its last three lines:
‘By Coblentz, on a rise of gentle ground, [from stanza LVI]
There is small and simple pyramid,
Crowning the summit of the verdant mound;
Beneath its base are heroes’ ashes hid,
Our enemy’s – but let not that forbid
Honour to Marceau! --------------
--------------He was freedom’s champion! [from stanza LVII]
Here Ehrenbreitstein, with her shattered wall, [from stanza LVIII]
Yet shows of what she was …
But Peace destroyed what war could never blight,
And laid those proud roofs bare to Summer’s rain –
On which the iron shower for years had pour’d in vain’
Contemporary critical reception
In comparison with previous and succeeding years, the response from the press in 1835 was moderate and somewhat favorable. Some critics, like that of the Observer admired his ‘sober pieces’ as ‘very beautiful’ but felt that his work had generally been ‘over-rated, particularly by Artists, for the public invariably laugh at his late pictures, considering him the only R.A. that has any genuine farcical humor in him’ (17 May). Turner’s bold and unconventional stylistic departures also tested the columnist of the Examiner, who conceded, ‘We still think him the first landscape painter in the world … In imagination, no one, ancient or modern, at all approaches him. His invention, too, his light and shade, and his divine aerial distances, are unequalled. But everything shall be at once surrendered for the sake of some tawdriness or trick!’ (10 May). Just as bewildered were visiting foreign critics Gustave Planche (writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes) and Gustav Friedrich Waagen (in his subsequent Works of Art and Artists in England, 1838), who both found it difficult to reconcile the exquisite monochrome engravings they knew of Turner’s images with the loose and spirited handling of paint and the expressive coloring that had become the norm at this stage of the artist’s life.
The majority of the local critics, however, were more habituated to what was seen as Turner’s wayward individualism and offered more appreciative opinions of The Bright Stone of Honour. Even the Times, for example, considered its ‘force of colors and the admirable harmony of tone are not to be equaled by any living artist’ (23 May). Fraser’s Magazine, meanwhile, judged Ehrenbreitstein as ‘beautiful’, in contrast to Keelmen heaving in Coals by Night, which it believed to be a ‘failure’. Yet more emphatic praise appeared in both the Spectator (8 May) and the Athenaeum (23 May). The former saluted the transcendence of Turner’s landscapes, describing the present work as ‘a poetical view on the Rhine, showing the rock of Ehrenbreitstein burnished with the bright golden rays of sunset. The tomb of Marceau is in the middle distance; and we scarcely need the quotation from BYRON to make us feel the force of this association of his fame with “the bright stone of honour”. It is a splendid tribute of genius to one of the champions of freedom.’ Building on this, the Athenaeum’s critic enthused, ‘Imagination and reality strive for mastery in this noble picture: there is an aerial splendor about it, such as the poetic love, and at the same time such a truthful representation of the real scene, as satisfies those who conceive that a landscape should be laid down with the accuracy of a district survey.’ If further endorsement were needed, Turner’s colleague and sometime rival, John Constable wrote to a friend with his exacting judgments on the 1835 exhibition, in which he marveled that ‘Turner’s light, whether it emanates from sun or moon, is exquisite’ (6 June).
In fact, in The Bright Stone of Honour, Constable would have been able to relish Turner’s realization of both sun and moonlight. Like the quotation appended to the picture’s title, this effect was also prompted by an evocative passage by Byron, this time from Canto 4 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818):
‘The moon is up, and yet it is not night;
Sunset divides the day with her.’
The dual effect was afterwards a crucial feature of Turner’s final Roman and Venetian subjects, as well as defining his masterpiece The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth, 1838 (1839; London, National Gallery). But it is exciting to see Turner adumbrate here such a charged poetic concept so hauntingly and with such delicacy.
Surprisingly, the painting did not attract a buyer at the 1835 exhibition, possibly because of the contracted engraving by Pye, who was still at work on his plate in 1844, when the picture greatly impressed John Ruskin. In his diary he was thrilled to have seen ‘the finest Turner I have come across for many a day – the Ehrenbreitstein.’ (2 March 1844). Working proofs of Pye’s engraving were at last pulled the following year, but it was not until 1846 that a full run was printed and issued. The result is a really fine translation (Turner’s preferred term) of the image. However, in accordance with contemporary taste, the print makes solid what is airy and mysteriously intangible in the painting, resolving and clarifying where paint alone is suggestive and simultaneously insubstantial. Yet the contrast is helpful and instructive, confirming in each detail what is so radical, so modern and so distinctive about the imprint of Turner’s hand on every part of the actual canvas.
A note on Ehrenbreitstein’s provenance
One of Turner’s most important patrons, Elhanan Bicknell formed a remarkable collection of works by the artist, consisting of twelve oil paintings and eighteen watercolors, all of which were acquired between 1838 and 1854. The son of a Unitarian cloth manufacturer turned school master, Bicknell was offered a partnership in his uncle's refinery of whale-produced spermacci, leading to a substantial financial interest in the Pacific whaling industry. By 1832, he had enough money to start collecting in the relatively unexplored field of contemporary British art, a taste far from that for the Old Masters, which had dominated the art world at the beginning of the century. His indifference towards the European school of painting was made plain in his famous remark, following a visit to Italy, that he had seen nothing he would 'give a damn for'. Bicknell’s subsequent collecting reveals equally decided views on English art; he owned several works by Gainsborough but nothing by Reynolds or, surprisingly, Constable, despite being related to the latter’s wife Maria Bicknell. He bought his first seven watercolors by Turner in 1838. In 1841, by which time Turner is known to have attended dinners at Bicknell's house in Herne Hill, South London, the latter had acquired the artist’s dazzling oil of the Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio at the Royal Academy (1841; Christie's, New York, 6 April 2006, lot 97, sold for $32,000,000; private collection). This was followed up by his commissioning of a companion piece: Campo Santo, Venice (Toledo, Toledo Museum of Art), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1842, the same year he bought The Blue Rigi, Sunrise (1842; London, Tate Britain), a watercolor from the celebrated series depicting the Swiss Alpine mountain that arguably represents the peak of Turner’s achievement in that medium. Bicknell’s collecting reached its apogee in 1844, the year in which he purchased no fewer than eight oils by Turner – including six on a single day - notably the monumental Palestrina (1828; London, Tate), Antwerp: Van Goyen Looking Out for a Subject (1833; New York, Frick Collection) and the present lot. He went on to buy two early oil paintings in 1851 and four more watercolors in 1854, after Turner's death. Following Bicknell’s death in 1861 his collection was put up for sale at Christie’s. Before the pictures were sent to King Street, the collection was opened to the public at Herne Hill where it excited such interest from artists, connoisseurs, and visitors that there was often ‘a line of carriages stretching more than a mile from the house.’ When the works eventually arrived at Christie’s for the six-day sale in April 1863, Bicknell’s remarkable procession of Turner oils were hung on a single wall, with the canvases of Palestrina and Ehrenbreitstein occupying the central position. In a piece printed on 28th April, The Star described the collection as one that 'would have done no discredit to a LORENZO the MAGNIFICENT' (for a full account of Bicknell, his collection and relationship with Turner, see Bicknell and Guiterman, 1987, op. cit., p. 34-44).
The present picture was acquired at the Bicknell sale by Agnew’s on behalf of Ralph Brocklebank, the scion of the eponymous shipping line. One of the oldest merchant shipping companies in the world, it was started by Daniel Brocklebank, a shipbuilder from Maine who founded the shipyard in Whitehaven, Cumberland, in 1785. Ralph Brocklebank, who lived at Childwall Hall, Liverpool, was a notable collector of pictures by British artists. In addition to Ehrenbreitstein, he owned Turner’s Somer-Hill, near Tunbridge (1811; Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland), The Beacon Light (1835-40; Cardiff, National Museum Cardiff), and The Grand Canal, Venice (1837; San Marino, The Huntington), known then as The Marriage of the Adriatic, which he bought from Agnew’s in 1874 and had been one of the star lots from the collection of John Ruskin, Turner’s friend and greatest champion.
Wentworth Beaumont, 2nd Viscount Allendale, acquired Ehrenbreitstein, again through Agnew’s, when it was sold by Brocklebank’s grandson in 1942. Allendale, who came from a long line of distinguished collectors, had sold his most celebrated picture, Giorgione’s Adoration of the Shepherds, also known as the Allendale Nativity (c.1505-10; Washington, National Gallery of Art), only five years previously but still owned such masterpieces as Jan Steen’s The Effects of Intemperance (1663-5; London, National Gallery) and Claude’s Landscape with Saint Philip baptizing the Eunuch (1678; Cardiff, National Museum Cardiff), a work that Turner himself would have greatly admired.
Turner, The Father of Modern Art
In 1835, the year in which Ehrenbreitstein was painted, Turner turned sixty. The work Turner produced during the remaining sixteen years of his life is now considered by many to be his supreme achievement, anticipating movements from Impressionism to abstract Expressionism and continuing to loom large over the artistic psyche of subsequent generations. Turner’s output from this period broke from the conventions of the time, leading his critics to denounce him as deranged. His revolutionary use of color and abstraction of subject in the genre of landscape painting paved the way for the radical movements that dominated the next century, influencing such artistic luminaries as Whistler, Monet, Rothko and Twombly.
After visiting the National Gallery in London in 1875, the artist Berthe Morisot wrote, ‘I saw many Turners. Whistler, whom we liked so much, imitates him a great deal’. Largely due to his long-standing and infamous feud with John Ruskin, Whistler was reluctant to concede his debt to Turner despite the profusion of evidence, not only in the atmospheric effects learnt from studying Turner’s late watercolors, but also in his choice of subjects, such as the River Thames in London and, later, the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.
It was no coincidence that both landmarks were later taken up with comparable energy by Claude Monet (1840-1926), who first encountered Turner’s work on a visit to London in 1870-71. Scholars have long noted the debt to Turner in Monet's Impression, Sunrise (1872-3; Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet), a work that has come to be seen as a manifesto for the Impressionist movement. Monet's subsequent variations on a single theme, seeking to capture the same subject under the transient effects of light and atmosphere, was a practice anticipated in Turner's serial watercolors, which the French painter had studied during his visits to the National Gallery while in London. This is particularly true of Monet’s later series of canvases - begun in 1900 - depicting the Houses of Parliament, compositions ultimately rooted in Turner’s magisterial The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834 (Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art). The critic Gustave Geffroy, a close friend of the French painter, noted in 1891 that Monet and Pissarro had returned from a trip to London ‘with the dazzling experience of the great Turner in their eyes’ (G. Geffroy, Claude Monet, sa vie, son temps, son oeuvre, Paris, 1892, p. 64). Interestingly, as with Whistler - albeit for different reasons - Monet sought to distance himself from Turner's influence, chiefly due to the Impressionists’ desire to establish their artistic lineage in French soil. However, Turner's art would be an inescapable point of reference for Monet and his contemporaries as they explored the possibilities of a form of landscape painting largely defined by color. The fiery palette with which Monet describes the effects of the setting sun in San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk (1908; Cardiff, National Museum Cardiff) recalls Turner’s earlier watercolors of the island and his canvas of The Dogana, San Giorgio, Citella, from the Steps of the Europa (1842; London, Tate Britain).
Turner’s influence extended deep into the 20th century, informing the painting of the American abstract Expressionists, notably Mark Rothko (1903-1970). On seeing Turner’s work on trips to Europe in the late 1950s and 60s, Rothko was drawn to the simplicity and communicational force of Turner’s late period, the essence of what the American was trying to achieve in his own work. It was during a visit to Lawrence Gowing’s seminal Museum of Modern Art exhibition in 1966, Turner: Imagination and Reality, that Rothko made his much-quoted remark, “This man Turner, he learnt a lot from me”. Such was his admiration for the British painter that, in 1969, the year before his death, Rothko donated the Seagram Murals to the Tate Gallery - the remarkable series of nine canvases originally intended for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York – in the hope they would be hung alongside Turner’s bequest to the nation (London, Tate Modern). The 1966 exhibition included a substantial number of unfinished paintings and watercolors, works that amplified the sense that Turner had ‘reached out into the borderland between representation and the abstract’ (M. Wheeler, in L. Gowing, Turner: Imagination and Reality, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1966, p. 5.).
Although Cy Twombly’s admiration for Turner has been well documented, it wasn’t until the 2011-12 exhibition: Turner Monet Twombly that the connection was examined more rigorously. In the exhibition catalogue Jeremy Lewison noted that Twombly’s Study from the Temeraire (1998-99; Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales) – a monumental triptych painted in response to Turner’s 1838 masterpiece in London’s National Gallery – was one of many by the American that are linked to certain late works by Turner through their exploration of ‘mortality, nostalgia, loss and mourning’ (Turner Monet Twombly. Later Paintings, London, 2011, p. 14). Although Twombly, a self-proclaimed ‘Romantic Symbolist’, was undoubtedly drawn to Turner’s facture; the raw, heavily impastoed surfaces that would inspire his own expressive canvases, it was also the British painter’s poeticism that attracted the American. Twombly’s lifelong act of inscribing words onto his paintings, used to extend his frame of reference, follows Turner’s own predilection for publishing verse in exhibition catalogues, as was the case with Ehrenbreitstein and its accompanying lines from Byron, a poet both artists deeply admired. Twombly’s desire to feel a closer connection with his artistic predecessors, beyond a shared pictorial doctrine, is evident in the collection of letters assembled during the American’s lifetime, including one written by Turner in 1813.