Joseph Mallord William Turner

Blackness Castle

1818

Image released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

License this image

In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

View by appointment
Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
Scotch Antiquities Sketchbook
Medium
Graphite on paper
Dimensions
Support: 112 × 186 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D13683
Turner Bequest CLXVII 55 a

Catalogue entry

As Katrina Thomson suggests, Turner probably sketched Blackness Castle on his return to Edinburgh from sketching Linlithgow Palace.1 Blackness Castle, built on a small promontory into the Firth of Forth near the village of Blackness, was one of the subjects proposed by Walter Scott for the Provincial Antiquities project but never published.2 Here the castle is seen from the west with Blackness Bay in the foreground and the village to the right on folio 59 (D13684; CLXVII 56).
Turner made further sketches of the castle in the Edinburgh 1818 sketchbook, (Tate D13516–D13519; Turner Bequest CLXVII 32a–34).

Thomas Ardill
March 2008

1
Katrina Thomson, Turner and Sir Walter Scott: The Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh 1999, p.28.
2
See Thomson 1997, p.[14] for a list of the published and proposed Provincial Antiquities subjects.

Read full Catalogue entry

Explore

You might like

Left Right

In the shop

Browse the shop