Turner filled this page with landscape sketches taken in the vicinity of Saint-Cloud, some seven miles west of central Paris. The undulations of terrain characteristic of that area feature in the lower right-hand quadrant of the page while two small drawings of the lost seventeenth-century chateau surrounded by its parterres and garden follies feature towards the top right-hand corner. Inverted in relation to the sketchbook as foliated, a view of the arched, stone bridge at Saint-Cloud taken from a high vantage is included on the left-hand edge of the page.
1 For examples of the watercolours of the riverside landscape around Saint-Cloud which Turner worked up with a view to engraved reproduction around this time, see Tate
D24688 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 123),
D24689 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 124), and
D24697 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 132). These culminated in three engravings in the 1835 volume of
Turner’s Annual Tour: Wanderings by the Loire and Seine (1833–5; later reissued as
Rivers of France), and a further engraved illustration for a new edition of Walter Scott’s
Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1834–6); see Tate impressions
T04739,
T05618,
T05619, and
T05620.
