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

Turner filled this page with cursory drawings of riverside landscapes with waterside buildings and bridges. The top two sketches depict the landscape around the Château de Saint-Cloud, some seven miles west of central Paris. This location is given away by the cylindrical pillared folly which stood within the palace pleasure grounds. For examples of the watercolours of the environs of Saint-Cloud which Turner worked up with a view to engraved reproduction around this time, see Tate D24688 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 123), D24689 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 124), and D24697 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 132). These culminated in three engravings in the 1835 volume of Turner’s Annual Tour: Wanderings by the Loire and Seine (1833–5; later reissued as Rivers of France), and a further engraved illustration for a new edition of Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1834–36); see Tate T04739, T05618, T05619, and T05620. A list of pages in the present volume featuring Saint-Cloud is provided in the sketchbook Introduction.