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 A Parisian Street; ?Petit Hôtel Bourienne 1832

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Parisian Street; ?Petit Hôtel Bourienne’ 1832
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 28 Recto:
A Parisian Street; ?Petit Hôtel Bourienne 1832
D23935
Turner Bequest CCLIV 28
Pencil on white wove paper, 174 x 117 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘5’ towards bottom left
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘28’ top left, inverted
Stamped in black ‘CCLIV – 28’ top left, inverted
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Inverted in relation to the sketchbook as foliated, this drawing depicts a view down a Parisian street. Special attention has been paid to the steep recession in perspective of a terrace of substantial buildings. This part of the volume includes several pages of drawings of the city’s streets taken as Turner searched for appropriate subjects for a new illustrated edition of Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte.1 The initial hunt for Napoleon’s Parisian lodgings was something of a wild goose chase.2 One of the houses he mistook for the former Emperor’s belonged to his private secretary, Louise Fauvelet de Bourienne, which is located on the kind of straight and narrow street depicted here.

John Chu
July 2014

1
W[illiam] G[eorge] Rawlinson, The Engraved Work of J.M.W. Turner, R.A., vol.II, London 1908, pp.289–92 nos.530–40.
2
Ian Warrell, Turner on the Seine, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1999, pp.52–4.

How to cite

John Chu, ‘A Parisian Street; ?Petit Hôtel Bourienne 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-a-parisian-street-petit-hotel-bourienne-r1173340, accessed 23 September 2024.