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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Saint-Cloud, Île-de-France 1832

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 3 Recto:
Saint-Cloud, Île-de-France 1832
D23890
Turner Bequest CCLIV 3
Pencil on white wove paper, torn, 174 x 117 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘3’ top right, ascending vertically
Stamped in black ‘CCLIV – 3’ top right, ascending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner filled much of the right-hand side of this page with a riverside landscape with dark, cloud-like foliage and a long, arched bridge. This page was evidently torn before Turner started work on the scene as the drawing continues over onto the exposed section of folio 4 recto (D23892; Turner Bequest CCLIV 4). A note on the right-hand edge of that page identifies the view as the crossing over the Seine at Saint-Cloud, some seven miles west of central Paris.1 For examples of the watercolours of the riverside landscape around Saint-Cloud which Turner worked up with a view to engraved reproduction around this time, see Tate D24688 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 123), D24689 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 124), and D24697 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 132). These culminated in three engravings in the 1835 volume of Turner’s Annual Tour: Wanderings by the Loire and Seine (1833–5; later reissued as Rivers of France), and a further engraved illustration for a new edition of Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1834–6); see Tate impressions T04739, T05618, T05619, and T05620. A list of pages in the sketchbook featuring Saint-Cloud is provided in the entry for folio 17 verso (D23914; Turner Bequest CCLIV 17a).
1
Ian Warrell, Turner on the Seine, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1999, pp.55, 223–8
Technical notes:
Around a fifth of this page was roughly torn from the volume before Turner started work on the sketch. See the entry for details.

John Chu
July 2014

How to cite

John Chu, ‘Saint-Cloud, Île-de-France 1832 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, April 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-saint-cloud-le-de-france-r1173295, accessed 28 March 2024.