Heidelberg

French troops blew up Heidelberg Castle in 1689, and by the 1840s the red sandstone ruin above the Neckar was a set piece of the new tourist route through the Rhineland. Turner sketched in the area in 1844. What he painted afterwards in London hands the castle back its roofs and walls and fills the terrace with a crowd in old costume, long read as the reception for Elector Frederick V and his English bride Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I, in 1613. The landscape underneath them has no Neckar, no bridge and no church tower, and the peaks behind carry snow that the hills around Heidelberg never reach. Scholars have since questioned whether the town is Heidelberg at all, and Tate now lists the picture as a castle in an alpine valley, called Heidelberg.