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

With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner filled much of this page with drawings of the terrain around Saint-Cloud, located some seven miles west of central Paris on the banks of the Seine. A sketch of the lost palace’s monumental façade occupies the centre of the page while a more cursory view of the riverbank is included immediately below. 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.