Joseph Mallord William Turner

Cours Saint-Pierre, Nantes

c.1826–8

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

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Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of: Loose Studies of Northern France
Medium: Watercolour, gouache and pen and watercolour on paper
Dimensions: Support: 131 × 182 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference: D24765
Turner Bequest CCLIX 200

Catalogue entry

This one of several colour studies on blue paper of fashionable figures and soldiers promenading on the Cours Saint-Pierre at Nantes which Turner worked up from his tour of Northern France in 1821; see also D24756 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 191).1 The unfinished cathedral looms in the distance. See the Introduction to this section for a list of comparable studies of the city.

Ian Warrell, Turner on the Loire, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1997, pp.44, 49, 50.

Technical Notes:

The sheet belongs to a batch of dense blue paper with dark fibres used by Turner made by George Steart of Bally, Ellen and Steart at De Montault Mill, Coombe Down, Bath. 1

Ibid., p.238.

Verso:

Inscribed in red ink with the inverted note ‘581’ in the bottom left hand corner of the sheet. Inscribed in pencil with the note ‘30 b’ in the centre of the sheet. Stamped in black with the Turner Bequest monogram and with ‘CCLIX – 200’ in the bottom right-hand corner of the sheet.

John Chu
March 2016

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