Joseph Mallord William Turner

Turner divided this page in half horizontally for two sketches of Selkirk from the west side of the Ettrick Water. The top sketch looks north-east along the road on which Turner was travelling and across the water to Selkirk, with Selkirk Bridge in the foreground and the Town Hall prominent in the centre of the town above it. This is very similar to the view on folio 40 verso (D26173). Beneath is a sketch made from a few hundred metres further along the road, so that we now look east across the bridge to the town. To the right of each sketch Turner has made two separate studies of the spire of the tower of Selkirk Town Hall.

The two inscriptions on this page, ‘P. Haugh’ and ‘P.H’, probably refer to Philiphaugh, a settlement and the site of a seventeenth-century battlefield shown in the foreground of Turner’s drawing.

There are further sketches of Selkirk on folio 40, 41 verso and 42 (D26172, D26175, D26176).

There is a light brown stain at the top centre-left of the page.