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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Scotland 1834 > Edinburgh Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Peebles: The Parish Church and the Ruins of Cross Kirk 1834

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Peebles: The Parish Church and the Ruins of Cross Kirk’ 1834
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 4 Verso:
Peebles: The Parish Church and the Ruins of Cross Kirk 1834
D26102
Turner Bequest CCLXVIII 4a
Pencil on white wove paper, 111 x 181 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
In his unpublished notes, David Wallace-Hadrill grouped this sketch under a series depicting Peebles and Neidpath.1 While Neidpath Castle (sketches of which begin opposite on folio 5; D26103) does not appear in this sketch, the buildings depicted here can be identified.
A church tower with a steeple and a ruined square tower are depicted in the sketch at the centre of the page and again at the bottom right. The tower and steeple resemble that of Peebles Parish Church (no longer extant), as depicted more clearly on folio 8 (D26109). The ruined tower in the centre sketch and the gabled ruin at the bottom right are the ruins of the Cross Kirk, formerly a pre-Reformation monastery and then the Parish Church until 1784, when a new Parish Church was built.2
There are light brown stains across the right of this page.

Thomas Ardill
December 2010

1
David Wallace Hadrill, ‘CCLXVIII “Edinburgh” 1831–34’, [circa 1991], Tate catalogue files.
2
‘Cross Kirk’, Undiscovered Scotland, accessed 7 December 2010, < http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/peebles/crosskirk/index.html >.

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘Peebles: The Parish Church and the Ruins of Cross Kirk 1834 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, December 2010, 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-peebles-the-parish-church-and-the-ruins-of-cross-kirk-r1136030, accessed 18 April 2024.