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

D24168–D24499; D40603; D40604; D40622; D40623

Turner Bequest CCLVII

Sketchbook bound in boards and ink-stained, buff parchment (see entries for D40604 and D40622)
169 leaves of white laid paper with added guttering (see Technical notes); page size 175 x 127 mm

Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

Bound in ink-stained parchment covers, this sketchbook contains a substantial quantity of pencil drawings which Turner made around Paris, the Île-de-France, and the River Marne in the autumn of 1832. As laid out in the Introduction to this tour, the material gathered in this volume contributed substantially to two of the artist’s major illustrative projects around this time: a new edition of Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1834–36) and the Seine volumes of Turner’s Annual Tour: Wanderings by the Loire and Seine (1833–5; later reissued as Rivers of France).1 The majority of pages have been worked up with the sketchbook turned horizontally, frequently to accommodate the expansive urban vistas and monumental façades to which Turner paid particular attention on this leg of the tour. As in the Seine and Paris sketchbook from the same tour, this set of studies varies greatly in levels of finish and detail. Contrast, for instance, his close observation of the Château de Fontainebleau on folio 84 verso (D24332; Turner Bequest CCLVII 84a) and the indecipherable jottings on folio 114 verso (D24392; Turner Bequest CCLVII 114a).

In 1973 art historian Gerald Finley first dated this sketchbook, along with Seine and Paris, to the 1832 tour on account of its targeting of Napoleonic subjects. Notable in this respect are the drawings of the town of Brienne-le-Château (listed later in the Introduction) where the Emperor attended military college. As one of Turner’s letters to his publisher makes plain, he visited this site for the first time on this tour with an illustration for the Scott text specifically in mind.2 Ian Warrell’s 1999 Turner on the Seine publication proposes a direct link between the Seine and Paris and Paris and Environs sketchbooks, speculating that the multiple views taken at Saint-Cloud in each volume were drawn on the same occasion, with the latter volume commenced once the pages of the former were filled sometime in early September. ³ Building on this supposition, Warrell draws up a possible itinerary for the latter stages of the tour in order to account for some of the major sites recorded in Paris and Environs.4 According to this version of events, Turner travelled upstream along the River Seine from Saint-Cloud, passing the Palais Bourbon and the Louvre as he approached central Paris. There he made studies of the capital’s many boulevards, quays, palaces, theatres, churches, and monuments. With Paris as his base, the nearby towns and estates of Versailles, Saint-Cyr-l’École, and Rambouillet were within easy reach. Warrell then envisages Turner moving on from Paris, following the Seine upstream past Charenton and Corbeil-Essones before tarrying at Fontainebleau and the medieval town of Melun. Cutting cross country, the later stages of this itinerary has Turner taking in the important monuments of Provins and Troyes and the lesser sights of Chalons-sur-Marne and Epernay along the River Marne. It is then suggested that the remaining subjects – including Malmaison, Saint-Denis, and Saint-Germain – were sketched on the return journey to London through Paris in mid-October.

As Warrell concedes, however, Turner’s haphazard use of the sketchbook ultimately precludes any detailed chronology of its contents.5 As in the other volumes attributed to this tour, the earliest drawings often appear to have been worked into whichever page happened to open first with blank pages eventually located as the sketchbook filled up. As a result, the contents make up something of a patchwork of motifs that make little sense when the foliation is followed conventionally. For example, folios 59 verso and 60 recto (D24282, D24283; Turner Bequest CCLVII 59a, CCLVII 60) feature drawings of both the Louvre and Melun, located some thirty miles apart. A clearer survey of those subjects which particularly preoccupied Turner on his sojourn in Paris and its surroundings in the autumn of 1832 might be gained, therefore, by considering his major subjects in distinct groups. What follows is an alphabetical listing of these frequently sketched sites followed by references to folios wherever the subject is unambiguously identifiable.