Doing a Raindance!

After weeks of drought we were promised rain this weekend, we were happy because we have a large rainwater cistern which could do with replenishing but as luck would have it, the village I live in missed out and instead it chucked down in Würzburg where the Urban Sketchers Würzburg/Unterfranken were meeting up! 

We met up in the Lusamgärtlein, a secluded little cloister garten with Romanesque pillars and the tomb of the Troubadour  Walther von der Vogelweide. The tomb is always covered with flowers because it's become a place of pilgrimage for those unlucky in love, or showing their gratitude for finding true love and surely enough as we met up people were arriving with flowers to lay on the tomb which  is just behind these pillars. 

We started to settle down to sketch but the rain gods had other ideas and so we had to skedaddle to the neighbouring  cathedral.

St Kilian's cathedral is a Romanesque building from about 1040. although there were two earlier churches on the site, the head reliquary of St Kilian and his two fellow missionaries is held here, their bodies are in the Neutor Kirche next door. In the cathedral we went off into the cloisters which were quiet and full of tombs of bishops and members of ancient aristocratic families. My sketch was done sitting on the floor looking down the cloisters to the tomb of Jakob Fuchs von Wonfort who died in 1558 and is featured on his tomb in his armour, kneeling on his dog and looking up toward a crucifix. Unfortunately, the aristocratic Fuchs family featured a couple of members who I'm not particularly fond of , well-known witch burners in Bamberg and Würzburg. 

We spent a couple of peaceful hours sketching, a major challenge for me was the dimmed lighting which changed when passers by entering the cloisters because they triggered an automatic light switch (the light was much better of course with electric light). Here’s the view out into the quad …. Lovely isn't it!