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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Northern France 1832 > Seine and Paris Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Seated Woman in a Large Bonnet at ?Saint-Cloud, Île-de-France 1832

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Seated Woman in a Large Bonnet at ?Saint-Cloud, Île-de-France’ 1832
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 9 Verso:
Seated Woman in a Large Bonnet at ?Saint-Cloud, Île-de-France 1832
D23898
Turner Bequest CCLIV 9a
Pencil on white wove paper, 174 x 117 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner worked a small sketch of a fashionably dressed woman seated on the ground towards the top of this page. Her large, halo-like bonnet echoes the roundness of her head and body while her splayed legs suggest heat and exhaustion. The prevalence of sketches taken at Saint-Cloud near Paris in this part of the sketchbook implies that this drawing was also made in that area. On special Sundays each September, large numbers of visitors massed at Saint-Cloud for an annual fair, during which time the interior of the chateau was opened up and the garden fountains turned on.1 Certainly, crowds of holiday-makers feature prominently in one of the Saint-Cloud watercolours which Turner worked up with a view to engraved reproduction around this time; see Tate D24697 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 132).
A list of pages in the sketchbook featuring Saint-Cloud is provided in the entry for folio 17 verso (D23914; Turner Bequest CCLIV 17a).

John Chu
July 2014

1
Ian Warrell, Turner on the Seine, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1999, p.228.

How to cite

John Chu, ‘Seated Woman in a Large Bonnet at ?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-seated-woman-in-a-large-bonnet-at-saint-cloud-le-de-france-r1173303, accessed 19 April 2024.