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

With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner filled this page with studies of the environs of Saint-Cloud and Sèvres, located on the Seine some seven miles west of central Paris. This location is identifiable by the sketch in the top right-hand corner of the page depicting one of the two long, arched bridges that traversed the river at this point.1 The hillside gardens and palace at Saint-Cloud feature in the large sketch at the centre of the stage, glimpsed through the narrow trunks of riverside trees. For examples of the watercolours of the environs of 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 (1834–36); see Tate T04739, T05618, T05619, and T05620. A list of pages in the present volume featuring Saint-Cloud is provided in the sketchbook Introduction.