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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Château Gaillard and Les Andelys, Normandy 1832

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 55 Recto:
Château Gaillard and Les Andelys, Normandy 1832
D23989
Turner Bequest CCLIV 55
Pencil on white wove paper, 174 x 117 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin ‘55’ in red ink top right, ascending vertically
Stamped in black ink ‘CCLIV – 55’ top right, ascending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner filled much of this page with wide landscape views of the Seine from the high hills around Château Gaillard, Normandy. The bottom of the page features a north-westerly panorama of the river, with the ruins of the medieval keep described from above in bottom left-hand corner. Some one hundred metres below, in the bottom right-hand corner, can be glimpsed the needle-like spire of the Church of Saint-Sauveur at Petit Andely, and just beyond this, the domed eighteenth-century edifice of the Saint-Jacques Hospital.
Of all the Seine valley sights, Château Gaillard and the local villages of Les Andelys were the subject of particular study in this sketchbook. For a list of associated sketches in the volume, see the entry for folio 51 verso (D23982; Turner Bequest CCLIV 51a). For the watercolours of this landmark in the Turner Bequest that the artist worked up with a view to engraved reproduction, see Tate D24678 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 113) and D24692 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 127). These culminated in two engravings in the 1835 volume of Turner’s Annual Tour: Wanderings by the Loire and Seine (1833–5; later reissued as Rivers of France); see Tate impressions T04708 and T04709.

John Chu
July 2014

How to cite

John Chu, ‘Château Gaillard and Les Andelys, Normandy 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-chateau-gaillard-and-les-andelys-normandy-r1173394, accessed 29 March 2024.