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

With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner worked multiple views of monumental Parisian structures onto this page, including quayside buildings across the centre of the page. The cylindrical building in the top half of the page is the neo-classical Rotonde de La Villette, constructed at the northern edge of the city as a customs building in the later eighteenth century. Turner made several sketches of the riverside in the present volume, a list of which is provided in the sketchbook Introduction. For the watercolours of the city’s quaysides which Turner worked up with a view to engraved reproduction around this time, see Tate D24683–D24685 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 118–20). These culminated in several engravings in the 1835 volume of Turner’s Annual Tour: Wanderings by the Loire and Seine (1833–5; later reissued as Rivers of France); see Tate impressions T05621–T05623.