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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Scotland 1831 > Loch Long Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Sketches of Loch Lomond, With Luss and Ben Lomond 1831

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Sketches of Loch Lomond, With Luss and Ben Lomond’ 1831
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 17 Verso:
Sketches of Loch Lomond, With Luss and Ben Lomond 1831
D26652
Turner Bequest CCLXXI 17a
Pencil on off-white laid writing paper, 101 x 158 mm
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ‘Lomond’ bottom right inverted
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXI – 17a’ top left descending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
David Wallace-Hadrill and Janet Carolan have suggested that Turner travelled around the Scottish lakes in 1831 with three round trips from a base in the River Clyde at Dumbarton (see Tour of Scotland for Scott’s Poetical Works Tour Introduction).1 One of these tours began with a journey up Loch Lomond and round the head of the loch by steamboat to Inversnaid (Tate D26617; Turner Bequest CCLXX 92), and then on to Loch Arklet, Loch Katrine and Loch Achray.
The present page, turned to the right, contains three sketches of Loch Lomond made as the steamer was approaching Luss on the western shore. The pier, with a cottage behind it, can be seen at the left of the middle sketch which looks north up Loch Lomond with a sailing boat. A sketch in the Stirling and the West sketchbook (Tate D26480; Turner Bequest CCLXX 23) shows that Turner landed at Luss.
At the bottom of the page, drawn with the book inverted from the other sketches and continuing slightly onto folio 18 (D26653), is a sketch of Ben Lomond, inscribed ‘Lomond’, as seen from the Loch near Luss. Turner made a very similar sketch of the mountain in the Stirling and the West sketchbook (Tate D26601; Turner Bequest CCLXX 84). The sketch at the top of the page of a wooded, hilly shoreline was probably also made from this point.
Other sketches of Loch Lomond were made on folios 3 verso, 12 verso–14, 16 and 18 (D26624, D26642–D26645, D26649, D26653), and in the Stirling and the West sketchbook (see D26480).

Thomas Ardill
October 2009

1
David Wallace-Hadrill and Janet Carolan, ‘Turner Round the Clyde and in Islay – 1831’, 1991, Tate catalogue files.

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘Sketches of Loch Lomond, With Luss and Ben Lomond 1831 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, October 2009, 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-sketches-of-loch-lomond-with-luss-and-ben-lomond-r1135089, accessed 24 September 2024.