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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Northern France 1832 > Loose Studies of Paris and the Seine > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Apollo Fountain at Versailles, Île de France c.1833

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Apollo Fountain at Versailles, Île de France’ c.1833
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
The Apollo Fountain at Versailles, Île de France c.1833
D24611
Turner Bequest CCLIX 46
Gouache and watercolour on blue paper, 143 x 191 mm
Inscribed in red ink ‘46’ bottom right
Blind-stamped with the Turner Bequest monogram bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCLIX 46’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner worked gouache and watercolour paints onto this sheet of blue paper to depict the seventeenth-century Apollo Fountain set amidst the gardens of the Château de Versailles near Paris. With the waters of the Grand Canal in the foreground, the gardens rise up to the palace’s western façade as indicated by a faint area of pink paint on the brow of the hill. Turner seems not to have worked up this colour study directly from a preliminary sketch although, as art historian Ian Warrell has noted, drawings taken in this part of the gardens of a similar date are included in the Paris and Environs sketchbook: see especially D24206 (Turner Bequest CCLVII 20a).1 The existence of the present colour study suggests that Turner considered the subject as an illustration for Turner’s Annual Tour: Wanderings by the Loire and Seine (1833–5; later reissued as Rivers of France) or the new edition of Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1834–36) although the gardens did not make it into either publication in the event.2
1
Ian Warrell, Turner on the Seine, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1999, p.272.
2
W[illiam] G[eorge] Rawlinson, The Engraved Work of J.M.W. Turner, R.A., London 1908, vol.II, pp.264–76 nos.453–92, 288–92 nos.525–39.
Technical notes:
The verso of this sheet is attached to the mount.

John Chu
August 2014

How to cite

John Chu, ‘The Apollo Fountain at Versailles, Île de France c.1833 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 2014, 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-the-apollo-fountain-at-versailles-le-de-france-r1173079, accessed 14 January 2025.