J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner filled this page with a view across the courtyard of a Parisian hôtel particulier, or private mansion. The monumental portico is very closely reminiscent of the late eighteenth-century Hôtel Benoit de Saint-Paulle which still survives, but with an Ionic ‘giant order’ rather than the Corinthian one recorded here. This part of the volume includes several pages of drawings of important Parisian streets and houses. Turner made these sketches in pursuit of appropriate subjects for a new illustrated edition of Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte.1 As laid out in the sketchbook Introduction, the initial hunt for Napoleon’s Parisian lodgings was something of a wild goose chase. ²