Joseph Mallord William Turner

With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner filled the lower half of this page with the panoramic view across the Seine valley as seen from the Château de Saint-Cloud, some seven miles west of central Paris. This location is given away by the description of the Lanterne de Démosthène on the left-hand side of the page which was a Napoleonic folly erected within the palace pleasure grounds.1 Cursorily drawn groups of figures occupy the foreground while one of the long, arched bridges of Saint-Cloud or nearby Sèvres traverses the river in the distance. For the watercolour of the Lanterne which Turner worked up with a view to engraved reproduction around this time, see Tate D24697 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 132). This led to an engraving 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 impression T05619.

A list of pages in the sketchbook featuring Saint-Cloud is provided in the entry for folio 17 verso (D23914; Turner Bequest CCLIV 17a).