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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Borthwick Castle 1818

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 78 Recto:
Borthwick Castle 1818
D13712
Turner Bequest CLXVII 70
Pencil on white wove paper, 112 x 186 mm
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ‘yellow’ top centre
Inscribed in blue ink ‘70’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CLXVII 70’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The castle in the pastoral scene is identifiable as Borthwick from its square cube shape broken by a distinctive vertical cutaway section at its western side. As Turner probably approached Borthwick from Gorebridge to the north-west, this represents his first view of the castle, and may have been the first sketch he made of it (see folio 79; D13714; CLXVII 71 for a similar view).
Seen between two hills and under a cloudy sky is a rolling landscape through which the Gore Water snakes its was towards the castle in the distance. This is a very different image of Borthwick Castle to the one that Turner later developed for his watercolour illustrations to the Provincial Antiquities: Borthwick Castle, 1818 (Indianapoilis Museum of Art).1 Here it sits in the landscape as a benign reminder of a more militaristic past, with an example in the foreground of the swords that have been beaten into ploughshares. In the final design by contrast, the castle represents an immutable force against time, nature and man.2
This sketch, however, was not forgotten, though it was transformed with the ploughman morphing into a man leading horses in the watercolour. Crichton Castle, circa 1818 (The Morgan Library and Museum, New York)3 may also have taken inspiration from this sketch with the castle positioned in the distance between hills, and the cattle herders in the foreground. Such a pastoral scene is rare for the Scottish sketches of 1818, though there is a comparable sketch of men with cattle and carts walking along a hill path in the Edinburgh, 1818 sketchbook (Tate D13570; Turner Bequest CLXVI 62a).

Thomas Ardill
May 2008

1
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, pp.425–6 no.1060.
2
See Shanes on this latter theme, Eric Shanes, Turner’s Human Landscape, London 1990, pp.12–14.
3
Wilton 1979, p.425 no.1059.

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘Borthwick Castle 1818 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 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-borthwick-castle-r1132269, accessed 29 March 2024.