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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Saint-Cloud, Île-de-France 1832

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 17 Verso:
Saint-Cloud, Île-de-France 1832
D23914
Turner Bequest CCLIV 17a
Pencil on white wove paper, 174 x 117 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘2’ top left, ‘T[...] seen [...]d t[...] nr 2’ top centre, ‘Saint-Cloud’ towards top right, ‘o[...] L[...]des’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
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.
The landscape around Saint-Cloud recurs frequently in the pages of this sketchbook; see folios 3 recto (D23890; Turner Bequest CCLIV 3), 3 verso (D23891; Turner Bequest CCLIV 3a), 11 verso (D23902; Turner Bequest CCLIV 11a), 14 verso (D23908; Turner Bequest CCLIV 14a), 16 verso (D23912; Turner Bequest CCLIV 16a), 17 recto (D23913; Turner Bequest CCLIV 17), 19 verso (D23918; Turner bequest CCLIV 19a).

John Chu
July 2014

1
Ian Warrell, Turner on the Seine, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1999, pp.55, 223–8.

How to cite

John Chu, ‘Saint-Cloud, Île-de-France 1832 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, April 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-saint-cloud-le-de-france-r1173319, accessed 29 March 2024.