With the sketchbook turned horizontally, Turner filled much of the right-hand side of this page with a riverside landscape with dark, cloud-like foliage and a long, arched bridge. This page was evidently torn before Turner started work on the scene as the drawing continues over onto the exposed section of folio 4 recto (
D23892; Turner Bequest CCLIV 4). A note on the right-hand edge of that page identifies the view as the crossing over the Seine at Saint-Cloud, some seven miles west of central Paris.
1 For examples of the watercolours of the riverside landscape around 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 (1834–6); see Tate impressions
T04739,
T05618,
T05619, and
T05620. A list of pages in the sketchbook featuring Saint-Cloud is provided in the entry for folio 17 verso (
D23914; Turner Bequest CCLIV 17a).
