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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Firth of Forth from near Hopetoun; Hopetoun House; Group of Figures 1822

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 45 Verso:
Firth of Forth from near Hopetoun; Hopetoun House; Group of Figures 1822
D17582
Turner Bequest CC 45a
Pencil on white wove paper, 187 x 114 mm
Blindstamped with the Turner Bequest stamp bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The sketches on this page, used with the book turned to the right, were made at and near Hopetoun House where the last event of George IV’s visit to Scotland took place on 29 August 1822. The King was to visit the home of John Hope, the fourth Earl of Hopetoun, on his way to Port Edgar, from where he departed Scotland that afternoon. Fellow artists David Wilkie and William Collins were present at the house that day for the knighting of the veteran Scottish artist, Henry Raeburn, and it is likely that Turner, who attended a dinner party given by Raeburn on 22 August,1 would have been present too.
One of the sketches on this page certainly suggests that Turner visited Hopetoun on this day. At the bottom of the page two men, two women and a small child stand together talking. The man at the left wears a bonnet (similar to some of the examples on the recto of this page; D17581), a short jacket and trews, while the figure next to him wears a long coat or gown and carries a large item in his arms. The two women are wearing dresses and small bonnets and the child is dressed in a smock and also wears a hat. Presuming that this drawing is connected to the others on the page the figures are probably some of the two thousand guests that were entertained in the house or grounds of Hopetoun. Just over a hundred of the principal guests were to sit at table with the king, while double that number would eat elsewhere in the house. Other, lower-station guests were entertained in the grounds while still more, consisting of tenant farmers and their families, school children and local families, were stationed around the grounds where they could catch a glimpse of the King’s arrival. It was even the Earl’s intention ‘to place as many of the well dressed women & children upon the tops of the two colonnades and Pavilion as possible’.2 Yeomen, dragoons and the Company of Archers, of which Hopetoun was the Captain-General, lined up along the front of the house.3
It appears, however, from the very few Hopetoun sketches, that if Turner was at the house on the 29th, he was there principally to see Raeburn’s knighting rather than to draw the day’s events (he may also have been put off sketching by the heavy rain that day). Nothing to do with Hopetoun is included in Turner’s sketches for a ‘Royal Progress’ (see George IV's Visit to Edinburgh 1822 Tour Introduction); the final composition of the sequence being related, Finley suggests, to the King’s departure from Holyrood.4
There is just one sketch of the house across the centre of the page. It is seen from the east and shows the grand frontage with curved colonnades connecting the main building to two pavilions. While it is drawn with some care and detail (or at least the left half is; the right, being symmetrical with it, is left unfinished), this small sketch with no landscape setting does not suggest an intention to develop the subject further.
What is more, the drawing adds little to Turner’s previous sketch of the house in 1818 (Tate D13530; Turner Bequest CLXVI 41a). It is as if he was more interested in recreating his sketch of four years earlier than he was in making new sketches and adding to his visual archive. The two views above are also recreations of 1818 sketches. At the top of the page is a sketch of the Firth of Forth made from near Hopetoun. It looks east with North Queensferry at the centre of the image and the island of Inchgarvie at the right, matching a sketch of 1818 almost exactly (Tate D13530–D13531; Turner Bequest CLXVI 41a–42). It is plausible that Turner recorded this view because it shows roughly where the royal squadron were stationed that day ready to receive the king at Port Edgar to take him home. However, Turner made no further sketches of the departure of the king, and did not include the subject in his ‘Royal Progress’ cycle of compositions (see George IV Visit to Edinburgh 1822 Tour Introduction), so the view’s connection to the subject is tenuous. The sketch of rooftops below (perhaps part of the same sketch) also matches those in the foreground of the 1818 view.
Turner also looked west from where he stood to recreate a view along the Firth of Forth towards Blackness Castle (folio 47 verso; D17586) and the same impulse on another occasion on this tour prompted him to draw again a view of Edinburgh from the Water of Leith made in 1818 (see folio 9 verso; D17525).

Thomas Ardill
October 2008

1
Finley 1981, p.22
2
John Prebble, The King’s Jaunt: George IV in Scotland, August 1822 ‘One and twenty daft days’, Edinburgh 1988, pp.343–6
3
Illustrated in watercolour by Denis Dighton, George IV on the steps of Hopetoun House, circa 1822 (Hopetoun House Preservation Trust, Edinburgh)
4
Finley 1981, p.37.

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘Firth of Forth from near Hopetoun; Hopetoun House; Group of Figures 1822 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, October 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-firth-of-forth-from-near-hopetoun-hopetoun-house-group-of-r1132923, accessed 28 March 2024.