With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner filled much of this page with wide landscape views of the Seine from the high hills around Château Gaillard, Normandy. The bottom of the page features a north-westerly panorama of the river, with the ruins of the medieval keep described from above in bottom left-hand corner. Some one hundred metres below, in the bottom right-hand corner, can be glimpsed the needle-like spire of the Church of Saint-Sauveur at Petit Andely, and just beyond this, the domed eighteenth-century edifice of the Saint-Jacques Hospital.
Of all the Seine valley sights, Château Gaillard and the local villages of Les Andelys were the subject of particular study in this sketchbook. For a list of associated sketches in the volume, see the entry for folio 51 verso (
D23982; Turner Bequest CCLIV 51a). For the watercolours of this landmark in the Turner Bequest that the artist worked up with a view to engraved reproduction, see Tate
D24678 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 113) and
D24692 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 127). These culminated in two 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
T04708 and
T04709.
