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

Taken from Braid Hill about two miles south of Edinburgh, this sketch shows from left to right: the distant Grampian Mountains, Edinburgh Castle, Calton Hill with Nelson’s Monument, and the western edge of Arthur’s Seat, with the Borough Moor in the foreground and a few buildings to the centre-left half hidden by a clump of trees. Walter Scott wrote of the view of Edinburgh from Braid Hill: ‘This prospect, though not certainly the richest and most romantic in the vicinity of Edinburgh, is possessed of extreme beauty, and excels others in the magnificence with which the Frith [sic] of Forth, its islands, and its northern shores, lie displayed as the background of the Scottish metropolis’.1 The view was drawn for Scott’s Provincial Antiquities by A.W. Calcott, and engraved by George Cooke, so it is possible that Turner made this sketch to work up into a watercolour for engraving, though in the end Calcott was chosen to illustrate the view.

Turner made three sketches of this view in 1818 (D13403, D13570; CLXV 46, CLXVI 62a), and another double-page sketch when he returned in 1831(Tate D25939, D25940; Turner Bequest CCLXVII 7a, 8).