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 Lieutenancy Building at Honfleur, Normandy c.1832

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Lieutenancy Building at Honfleur, Normandy’ c.1832
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
The Lieutenancy Building at Honfleur, Normandy c.1832
D24641
Turner Bequest CCLIX 76
Gouache and watercolour and pen on blue paper, 139 x 192 mm
Blind-stamped with the Turner Bequest monogram bottom left
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner worked gouache and watercolour paints over this ink drawing to depict the quayside at Honfleur in Normandy. Behind the busy scene of small sailing vessels and their crews rises the picturesque structure of the port’s Lieutenancy Building, one of the town’s principal administrative centres. This is one of seven colour studies of Honfleur which Turner worked up around this date with a view to potential publication; these are listed under the entry for Tate D24580 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 15). Art historian Ian Warrell has identified two pencil sketches in the Tancarville and Lillebonne sketchbook as the sources for the present study: see Tate D23726 (Turner Bequest CCLIII 15) and Tate D23727 (Turner Bequest CCLIII 15a).1 For the finished watercolour of Honfleur, see Tate D24700 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 135). All this activity culminated in an engraved illustration for the 1834 volume of Turner’s Annual Tour: Wanderings by the Loire and Seine (1833–5; later reissued as Rivers of France); see Tate impression T04707.
1
Ian Warrell, Turner on the Seine, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1999, p269.
Verso:
The centre of the sheet is marked with two notes; these read ‘15’ in white chalk and ‘CCLIX . 76’ in pencil. The centre also bears the Turner Bequest monogram and ‘CCLIX 76’ stamped in black. There is a light brown smudge in the centre.

John Chu
August 2014

How to cite

John Chu, ‘The Lieutenancy Building at Honfleur, Normandy c.1832 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-lieutenancy-building-at-honfleur-normandy-r1173082, accessed 14 January 2025.