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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Monument to Lafayette before Les Invalides, Paris 1832

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 159 Verso:
Monument to Lafayette before Les Invalides, Paris 1832
D24480
Turner Bequest CCLVII 159a
Pencil on white laid paper, 175 x 127 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil (see main entry)
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner filled this page with studies of the seventeenth-century military complex of Les Invalides in Paris. At the centre of the page is featured the fountain recently rededicated to General Lafayette.1 The notes scattered along the bottom of the page and in the top right-hand corner are only semi-legible although they presumably record the dedicatory inscription of the monument (no longer extant). The legible fragments read: ‘Au Citoyens du Vieux Monde’, ‘Au Genéral de Chef de la Garde National’, ‘L’Ami et de Washington et de Philippe 1er’, ‘Le Patriots de 89 et de 1830’. Turner made several sketches of Les Invalides in the present volume, a list of which is provided in the sketchbook Introduction. The existence these drawings and a closely related 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.2

John Chu
January 2015

1
Étienne Charavay, Le Général La Fayette, 1757–1834, Paris 1898, p.525
2
W[illiam] G[eorge] Rawlinson, The Engraved Work of J.M.W. Turner, R.A., London 1908, . vol.II, pp.264–76 nos.453–92, 288–92 nos.525–39.

How to cite

John Chu, ‘Monument to Lafayette before Les Invalides, Paris 1832 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, January 2015, 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-monument-to-lafayette-before-les-invalides-paris-r1175508, accessed 28 March 2024.