Joseph Mallord William Turner

Turner worked gouache and watercolour paints onto this sheet of blue paper to depict the seventeenth-century Apollo Fountain set amidst the gardens of the Château de Versailles near Paris. With the waters of the Grand Canal in the foreground, the gardens rise up to the palace’s western façade as indicated by a faint area of pink paint on the brow of the hill. Turner seems not to have worked up this colour study directly from a preliminary sketch although, as art historian Ian Warrell has noted, drawings taken in this part of the gardens of a similar date are included in the Paris and Environs sketchbook: see especially D24206 (Turner Bequest CCLVII 20a).1 The existence of the present colour study 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 the gardens did not make it into either publication in the event.2

Technical notes:

The verso of this sheet is attached to the mount.