Joseph Mallord William Turner

With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner filled this page with studies of the monumental architecture and stone bridges of Paris. Distinctive is the drawing of the dome of the seventeenth-century military complex of Les Invalides worked into the left-hand edge of the page. Turner made several sketches of this 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