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 > Seine and Paris Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Fashionably Dressed Figures ?at Saint-Cloud, Île-de-France 1832

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Fashionably Dressed Figures ?at Saint-Cloud, Île-de-France’ 1832
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 2 Recto:
Fashionably Dressed Figures ?at Saint-Cloud, Île-de-France 1832
D23888
Turner Bequest CCLIV 2
Pencil on white wove paper, 174 x 117 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘2’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCLIV – 2’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner filled the top section of this page with several slight sketches, including figures in fashionable dress. Towards the top left-hand corner can be seen a full-length study of a woman in a wide-brimmed bonnet. In the centre, a woman stands next to a seated companion with a high coiffure and puff-sleeves. The tree-like vertical lines which divide these two passages suggest that the drawings were made in the palace gardens at Saint-Cloud, some seven miles west of central Paris and the subject of extensive study in this sketchbook. On special Sundays each September, large numbers of visitors massed at this location for an annual fair, during which time the interior of the chateau was opened up and the garden fountains turned on.1 Certainly, crowds of holiday-makers feature prominently in one of the Saint-Cloud watercolours which Turner worked up with a view to engraved reproduction around this time; see especially Tate D24697 (Turner Bequest CCLIX 132).

John Chu
July 2014

1
Ian Warrell, Turner on the Seine, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1999, p.228.

How to cite

John Chu, ‘Fashionably Dressed Figures ?at Saint-Cloud, Île-de-France 1832 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 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-fashionably-dressed-figures-at-saint-cloud-le-de-france-r1173293, accessed 29 January 2025.