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

Although in his inventory of 1909 Finberg tentatively identified this page as containing sketches ‘At Stirling(?)’, he later annotated his copy with the identification ‘Heriot’s Hospital’.1 This is the sketch at the top of the page. Turner visited the school on 1 October 1834 in the company of Robert Cadell who had commissioned him to make illustration for a new edition of Sir Walter Scott’s Prose Works and may have been considering Heriot’s Hospital as a possible illustration to the Fortunes of Nigel (see Tate D26247; Turner Bequest CCLXVIII 81 for further information and a full list of Turner’s sketches of Hertiot’s Hospital).

This view recalls the watercolour that Turner made of the building for Scott’s Provincial Antiquities publication: Heriot’s Hospital circa 1819 (National Gallery of Scotland),2 which perhaps like that view was taken from the West Bow near Edinburgh’s Grassmarket; this sketch similarly uses the school building as a grand backdrop to a more humble foreground. The horse and cart and the figures sitting on the ground at the right are both details taken from the watercolour, though the poses and positions have been changed slightly.

That he made such laboriously detailed and finished sketches of the building in the Edinburgh sketchbook (Tate D26247) suggests that Turner was not content to simply recycle the composition of a previous painting, an approach that Scott had strongly discouraged during a previous commission.3 However, the replication of that composition in this sketch suggests that he may have at least considered it as an option.

At the bottom of the page is a sketch of the Grassmarket with Edinburgh Castle. Looking north-west along the street the castle looms above the crowded buildings along the north of the street. At the left of the sketch is the old corn exchange. Turner had sketched the same view in 1818: Tate D13410 (Turner Bequest CLXV 49a). The separate detail-sketch to the left of the castle depicts the cupola of the Corn Exchange. There is a similar sketch in the Edinburgh sketchbook: Tate D26219 (Turner Bequest CCLXVIII 64)