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

With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner worked a distant view of Paris into the bottom left-hand corner of this page. The two western towers of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame can be seen faintly towards the right-hand side of the scene. Much of the rest of the page is taken up with vistas across a wide riverside landscape lined with a dense complex of building on the right and traversed through the middle by a long, arched bridge. Turner’s handling here is too cursory for the identification of a definite location although neighbouring pages of the volume heavily feature the landscape around Saint-Cloud, some seven miles west of Paris, where the Seine is crossed by this kind of bridge.1 For comparisons, see examples of the watercolours of this area which Turner worked up with a view to engraved reproduction around this time; Tate D24688 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 123), D24689 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 124), and D24697 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 132).

A list of pages in the sketchbook featuring Saint-Cloud is provided in the entry for folio 17 verso (D23914; Turner Bequest CCLIV 17a).