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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Passy, Paris 1826

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 41 Verso:
Passy, Paris 1826
D23322
Turner Bequest CCXLIX 39a
Pencil on white laid paper, 103 x 153 mm
Partial watermark of bunch of grapes
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘C[...]’ centre
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner filled the centre of this page with a view of the Seine as it flows out of Paris. The scene has been identified as Passy, a little to the east of the city.1 In his 1909 inventory, A.J. Finberg transcribed the note in the upper right-hand quadrant of the page as ‘Cyp’, implicitly suggesting that Turner wished to connect his impressions of the scene with the landscapes of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Aelbert Cuyp.2 Several art historians subsequently connected this note to multiple comparable notes on Cuyp in other sketchbooks.3

John Chu
May 2015

1
Ian Warrell, Turner on the Loire, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1997, p. 237.
2
A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.II, p.758.
3
Jack Lindsay, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work: A Critical Biography, London 1966, pp.54, 226 note 25; Evelyn Joll, Martin Butlin and Luke Herrmann (eds.), The Oxford Companion to J.M.W. Turner, Oxford 2001, p.69.

How to cite

John Chu, ‘Passy, Paris 1826 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 2015, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, March 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-passy-paris-r1185162, accessed 28 March 2024.