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

With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner filled this page with studies of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century façades of the Château de Fontainebleau, located some forty miles south-east of central Paris. The top half of the page is dominated by a long, continuous description of the edifice as seen from the south. Turner made numerous sketches of the palace on the 1832 tour with a view to illustrating an episode in Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1834–36); see Tate T04980. A list of pages featuring Fontainebleau in the present volume is provided in the sketchbook Introduction.