Exhibited with the following text from Childe Harold Canto Ill, alluding to the death of the French Revolutionary General Marceau at the siege of Ehrenbreitstein in 1796:

By Coblentz, on a rise of gentle ground,

There is a small and simple pyramid,

Crowning the summit of the verdant mound:

Beneath its base are heroes' ashes hid,

Our enemy's - but let that not forbid

Honour to Marceau—

—He was freedom's champion!

Here Ehrenbrietstein, with her shattered wall,

Yet shews of what he was.

The Spectator for 9 May 1835 called the picture 'a splendid tribute of genius to one of the champions of freedom' and the picture was generally praised. For the Athenaeum, 23 May, 'Imagination and reality strive for mastery in this noble picture: there is an aerial splendour 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. Only the Morning Herald for 2 May and the Examiner for 10 May dissented in blanket attacks on all his works at the 1835 exhibition. The picture was not sold until 1844, when the collector Elhanan Bicknell bought it together with five others.

Turner had visited Ehrenbreitstein on his tour of the Rhine in 1819 and again in 1834 when he was planning a series of engravings of German rivers to follow the Rivers of France. A large sheet of paper in the British Museum, folded into I6 sections, bears a number of related drawings (T.B.CCCXLIV -I to 16, especially 1, 3 and 6). Turner painted several watercolours of Ehrenbreitstein in the 1840s.