Joseph Mallord William Turner

Turner worked gouache and watercolour paints onto this sheet of blue paper to depict an aqueduct or viaduct crossing a valley. On stylistic grounds, Art historian Ian Warrell linked this piece to the ‘colour studies’ of northern French subjects which the artist painted the early 1830s with a view to engraved illustration; the lost Roman aqueduct at Arcueil south of Paris was proposed as the motif at that point.1 Certainly Turner had taken considerable interest in this terrain during earlier tours; see, for example, Tate D24525 (Turner Bequest CCLVIII 13a) in the Dieppe, Rouen and Paris sketchbook of 1821.

Verso:

The centre of the sheet is inscribed with a pencil note reading ‘22a’. The Tate number ‘D.20255’ is inscribed in the bottom right-hand corner in pencil. There is a slight water stain towards the bottom left-hand corner.