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

With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner worked a drawing of the seventeenth-century military complex of Les Invalides in Paris onto this page. The sketch along the central strip of the page shows the domed edifice from the nearby Champs de Mars, just to the north. Turner made several sketches of the building in the present volume, a list of which is provided in the sketchbook Introduction. The existence these drawings and a watercolour study (Tate D24572; Turner Bequest CCLIX 7) suggests that Turner considered the subject as an illustration for Turner’s Annual Tour: Wanderings by the Loire and Seine (1833–5; later reissued as Rivers of France) or the new edition of Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1834–36) although Les Invalides did not make it into either publication in the event.1 The pointed pediment and general aspect of the smaller domed building in the bottom right-hand corner of the page is inconsistent with Les Invalides and may represent the Institut de France from the Seine instead.