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

For Turner at Waterloo in 1817 see Introduction to this sketchbook and notes to folio 16 verso (D12731).

Turner divided this page into horizontal strips, to make three sketches. At the top, he drew the battlefield looking north from the French lines with the Belle Alliance inn on the right and the farm of La Haye Sainte in the middle distance; for these buildings see especially notes to folio 20 verso (D12739). Relative to this sketch, annotations mark the distant ‘British lines | Corner of Hill’ towards top left, ‘French lines’ towards bottom left, ‘Haye Sainte’ above the centre, and ‘Belle Alliance’ at top right.

Below are two quick outlines of Hougoumont, the small château to the west of the field which the Scots and Coldstream Guards held throughout repeated French attacks and shelling that set the roof ablaze. In the middle of the page is a view of the south side of the château with its wooden gates and the ruins of a single–story extension projecting forwards from it, inscribed on the right ‘Orchard Entrance |of Hugomont’. Below, continued on folio 23 recto opposite (D12744), is the ‘Side wall of | Hugomont’, as noted towards the bottom right of this page.

Turner’s sketches of Hougoumont running to folio 26 recto (D12749) informed his depiction of it (albeit only in a general sense), still burning during the night after the battle, in his painting The Field of Waterloo, exhibited in 1818 (Tate N00500).1 For a plan of Hougoumont and notes on the action there see folio 24 verso (D12746).