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

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

Joseph Mallord William Turner Edinburgh from Calton Hill with the Stewart and Playfair Monuments 1834

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Edinburgh from Calton Hill with the Stewart and Playfair Monuments’ 1834
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 77 Verso:
Edinburgh from Calton Hill with the Stewart and Playfair Monuments 1834
D26407
Turner Bequest CCLXIX 77a
Pencil on off-white wove paper, 113 x 190 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
There are two monuments in this view of Edinburgh from Calton Hill, though neither of them is the Burns’ Monument as Finberg suggested.1 The nearest structure at the left of the page is the 1826 monument to John Playfair, with, to the right, a corner of the Royal Observatory. To the left, a hundred metres away to the west-south-west, is the Dugald Stewart Monument. Further down the hill at the bottom left of the page is the Governor’s House of Calton Gaol, and Edinburgh Castle dominates the skyline at the centre of the page with the spires of St Giles’s Cathedral and the Tron Kirk to the left.
There is another sketch of the same view opposite this one on folio 78 (D26408). These belong to a series of views of Edinburgh from near the Stewart Monument; see folio 79 verso (D26411) for details.

Thomas Ardill
November 2010

1
Finberg 1909, II, p.867.

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘Edinburgh from Calton Hill with the Stewart and Playfair Monuments 1834 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 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-edinburgh-from-calton-hill-with-the-stewart-and-playfair-r1136337, accessed 25 April 2024.