Joseph Mallord William Turner

The drawing was made with the page turned horizontally. The old castle at Hawarden is an ancient fortification that played a significant part in the Welsh wars of the thirteenth century, which had already attracted Turner’s attention as subject matter for romantic landscapes: his oil painting Dolbadern Castle, North Wales (Royal Academy of Arts, London)1 had appeared at the Royal Academy’s exhibition in the spring of 1801, prior to the present tour, as had the large watercolour of Caernarvon Castle, North Wales the year before (Tate D04164; Turner Bequest LXX M).2 See also the unfinished watercolour of the destruction of the Bards by Edward I (Tate D04168; Turner Bequest LXX Q) and related studies.

Hawarden’s old castle was slighted by Cromwellian troops during the Civil War, and is now a ruin in the grounds of the new castle, an eighteenth– and nineteenth–century Gothick building famous as the home of the Victorian Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898). Further views at Hawarden are on folios 53 verso, 54 recto and 55 recto (D05132–D05134), and possibly 56 recto and 57 recto (D05135, D05136).