Turner worked ink, gouache, and watercolour paints onto this sheet of blue paper to depict this view across of Quillebeuf, located on the Normandy banks of the Seine. The tower rising above the cluster of buildings at the centre of the scene belongs to the Romanesque Church of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Port while the ruins of the medieval castle at Tancarville can be glimpsed on the far bank of the river.
1 Pencil sketches of Quillebeuf recur several times in the
Guernsey and
Seine and Paris sketchbooks and presumably contributed to the conception of this colour study and also to Tate
D24729 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 164) and
D24738 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 173). For the sketchbook drawings, see the entries for Tate
D23568 (Turner Bequest CCLII 26),
D23569 (Turner Bequest CCLII 26a),
D24033 (Turner Bequest CCLIV 77), and
D24038 (Turner Bequest CCLIV 79a). All this activity culminated in the exhibition of a major oil piece on the subject,
The Mouth of the Seine, Quille-Boeuf, (Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon)
2 at the Royal Academy in 1833, and also in an engraving in the 1834 volume of
Turner’s Annual Tour: Wanderings by the Loire and Seine (1833–5; later reissued as
Rivers of France); see Tate impression
T05598.
