Drawn with the sketchbook inverted. Despite Finberg’s suggestion, this sketch appears to be unconnected with either of Turner’s pictures,
Lowther Castle, Westmorland, the Seat of the Earl of Lonsdale: North-West View from Ullswater Lane: Evening and
Lowther Castle, Westmorland, the Seat of the Earl of Lonsdale (the North Front), with the River Lowther: Mid-day exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1810 (private collection).
1 Although this sketchbook contains sketches of architectural details of the castle on folios 25 and 26 (
D07892,
D07893), nothing else has emerged to challenge Butlin and Joll’s statement that there are ‘no known drawings directly connected with the finished pictures in the Turner Bequest’.
2 If this is a view of the park at Lowther it excludes the castle that was the point of Turner’s visit, and the landscape could be elsewhere altogether. A sharp pencil line at left indicates something propped against a tree; if this is a gun there must be some relationship to drawings of gun-dogs and sportsmen towards the back of the book, and more specifically to the verses about a shooting accident of which a crucial passage appears opposite on 14 verso (
D07875); see also Introduction and note to13 verso (
D07873). If this writer is right in his hunch (shared by David Hill) that these subjects and verses spring from a visit to Farnley Hall, this landscape might be Wharfedale.
