Joseph Mallord William Turner

Doune Castle

c.1801–4

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

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Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
Watercolours Derived from the 1801 Scottish Tour
Medium
Watercolour on paper
Dimensions
Support: 667 × 845 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D08281
Turner Bequest CXXI Y

Catalogue entry

This large colour study has not been identified hitherto. It is based on two drawings in the Scotch Lakes sketchbook (Tate D03199–D03202; Turner Bequest LVI 146a–147, 147a–148). Both show the whole of this view, though the bridge over the River Teith appears only in the second of those sketches. In that drawing the castle appears only in general outline. It is rendered in greater detail in the first, where the identification is plain, as is the relationship between castle and bridge.
Doune is about four miles west of Dunblane, and Turner drew it on his way from there to Stirling during his tour of Scotland in 1801. Finberg describes this colour study as ‘unfinished’,1 but it may have been made in preparation for a large watercolour, comparable to the 1804 view of Edinburgh from Caulton–hill (Tate D03639; Turner Bequest LX H).2 The work was never executed.
1
See Finberg 1909, I, p.335.
2
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.339 no.348, pl.56.
Verso:
Blank

Andrew Wilton
May 2013

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