J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner filled much of this page with slight jottings, the most clearly decipherable of which are a dark, cloud-like section of foliage towards the left-hand edge and a long, arched bridge to the right. Turner’s handling here is too cursory for the identification of a definite location although neighbouring pages of the volume heavily feature the landscape around Saint-Cloud, some seven miles west of Paris, where the Seine is twice traversed by this kind of bridge.1 See, for example, folio 3 recto (D23890; Turner Bequest CCLIV 3). For comparisons, see examples of the watercolours of this area which Turner worked up with a view to engraved reproduction around this time; Tate D24688 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 123), D24689 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 124), and D24697 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 132).