Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Rambouillet, Île-de-France 1832
Pencil on white laid paper attached to binding board, 175 x 127 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘C[...] M[...]’ towards top left, ‘Ramb ulitt’ towards bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCLVII’ towards bottom right, descending vertically
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
References
1909
A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.II, p.778.
1999
Ian Warrell, Turner on the Seine, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1999, p.56.
With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner filled its inside back cover with these studies of Rambouillet, located some thirty miles south-west of Paris. The round corner towers of the chateau with their conical roofs are featured just to the right of centre of the cover. Turner made several sketches of this site in the present volume, a list of which is provided in the sketchbook Introduction.
The name and address of the stationer who supplied this sketchbook is pasted into the top right-hand corner of this cover. It reads: ‘COLLARD, | Md. Papetier, | Rue neuve des Petits-Champs, no.69’. Art historian Ian Warrell has located this lost street to Paris’s right bank, west of the Palais Royale.
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How to cite
John Chu, ‘Rambouillet, Île-de-France 1832 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, January 2015, 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-rambouillet-le-de-france-r1175195, accessed 12 July 2026.