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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Northern France 1832 > Seine and Paris Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner ?A Mausoleum Interior at Père Lachaise, Paris 1832

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘?A Mausoleum Interior at Père Lachaise, Paris’ 1832
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 20 Recto:
?A Mausoleum Interior at Père Lachaise, Paris 1832
D23919
Turner Bequest CCLIV 20
Pencil on white wove paper, 174 x 117 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘20’ top right, ascending vertically
Stamped in black ‘CCLIV – 20’ top right, ascending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner filled the left-hand side of this page with a study of an interior with a Gothic vault and a flight of steps. On the other side of the page is a wall, apparently lined floor to ceiling with plaques. Two crucifixes on this feature suggest a religious context. Although the location of these buildings has not been identified, the neighbouring pages in the sketchbook are much taken up with views of the hillside Père-Lachaise Cemetery some two miles east of central Paris.1 Turner may therefore have ventured into one of the larger family mausoleums at that site to make these drawings. The many studies of Père-Lachaise in this sketchbook culminated in an engraved illustration for a new edition of Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1834–6); see Tate impression T04744.

John Chu
July 2014

1
Ian Warrell, Turner on the Seine, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1999, pp.54, 243–6.

How to cite

John Chu, ‘?A Mausoleum Interior at Père Lachaise, Paris 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-a-mausoleum-interior-at-pere-lachaise-paris-r1173324, accessed 19 September 2024.