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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner High Street, Looking West 1818

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 76 Recto:
High Street, Looking West 1818
D13708
Turner Bequest CLXVII 68
Pencil on white wove paper, 112 x 186 mm
Inscribed in pencil by Turner, ‘C[...]m[...]th t[...]s’ upper centre left, ‘Kning forty’ | ‘P[...]’‘[...] Gloria’ ‘J[..] [?]House’ centre left, ‘W’ | ‘White’ lower left, ‘Ling’ ‘Don[...]ton’ ‘[?]Marshall’ | ‘[?]Clough[...]’ ‘p[...]t[...]g’ ‘[..]b[..]k’ bottom left, ‘[...] [?]Drummond [...]’ bottom right
Inscribed in blue ink ‘68’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CLXVII 68’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This is one of two drawings in this sketchbook of the view along Edinburgh High Street looking west. While folio 64 verso (D13695; CLXVII 61a) shows the view from just east of the Tron Kirk, this present sketch is from further west towards Canongate so that Tron Kirk and St Giles’s Cathedral are seen further up the street. In both sketches Turner takes one of the street’s well heads as the focus for the foreground of his picture. As these were the only means until the 1820s by which the inhabitants of Edinburgh’s Old Town could get water they became local meeting points.1 Again the well head is surrounded by a crowd with a row of jugs and pales to collect the water – a motif Turner adopted in the foreground of his watercolour High Street, Edinburgh, circa 1818 (Yale Center for British Art, USA).2 There are also several carts on the High Street. Another compositional similarity is the flight of steps at the right of the picture, and the doorways of the north side of the street. The inscriptions refer to the names of shops and establishments.

Thomas Ardill
April 2008

1
The Grass-Market.com, http://www.grassmarket-edinburgh.com/history/bow-well.html accessed 2 April 2008.
2
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.426 no.1061.

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘High Street, Looking West 1818 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 2008, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-high-street-looking-west-r1132265, accessed 19 September 2024.