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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Normandy ?1829 > Tancarville and Lillebonne Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Street Scene with the Church of Notre-Dame, Lillebonne ?1829

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Street Scene with the Church of Notre-Dame, Lillebonne’ ?1829
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 32 Recto:
Street Scene with the Church of Notre-Dame, Lillebonne ?1829
D23760
Turner Bequest CCLIII 32
Pencil on pale cream laid paper, 107 x 156 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘32’ top right ascending vertically
Stamped in black ‘CCLIII – 32’ top right ascending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The page contains a sketch, drawn horizontally, of a church on a street corner and the street winding off ahead. Finberg noted it simply as a ‘Street, with church’,1 but the location has been further identified as Lillebonne.2 From his viewpoint on folio 31 verso opposite (D23759), Turner has walked across the town square to record the church from a closer distance in this sketch. He conveys the structure and decorative elements of the church façade in some detail. These elements correspond with those of the sixteenth-century3 Church of Notre-Dame.
1
Finberg 1909, II, p.769.
2
?Ian Warrell, ‘Turner on the Seine: Topographical Index’, c.1999, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain (printout in copy of Ian Warrell, Turner on the Seine, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1999), p.3.
3
‘Parish Church of Notre-Dame, French Heritage monument to Lillebonne’, www.en.patrimoine-de-france.com, accessed 2 March 2017, http://en.patrimoine-de-france.com/seine-maritime/lillebonne/eglise-paroissiale-notre-dame-10.php.
Technical notes:
There is a slight brownish stain, from damage likely caused by the 1928 Tate Gallery flood (see the technical notes to the sketchbook’s Introduction), at bottom right of the page.

Caroline South
May 2017

How to cite

Caroline South, ‘Street Scene with the Church of Notre-Dame, Lillebonne ?1829 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 2017, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-street-scene-with-the-church-of-notre-dame-lillebonne-r1195666, accessed 25 April 2024.