J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Scotland 1831 > Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Hermitage Castle, Lidderdale 1831

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Hermitage Castle, Lidderdale’ 1831
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio: 66 Verso
Hermitage Castle, Lidderdale 1831
D25892
Turner Bequest CCLXVI 66a
Pencil on white wove paper, 187 x 114 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This page is one of two, used with the sketchbook turned to the side, that record Hermitage Castle in small sketches made from different positions around the castle (see also folio 66; D25891). The three sketches on the present page, all made with the book turned to the right, show the castle from about forty or fifty metres away to the south-east (top), south-west (middle) and due south (bottom). Although each includes the rough shape of the landscape in which it is set, the primary purpose seems to have been to capture quickly the general shape of the castle from three angles rather than to record architectural details (as in folios 64 verso and 65; D25888, D25890), topographical information (folio 66), or to try out compositional ideas (folios 63 verso, 64, 65, 67 and 68 verso; D25886, D25887, D25889, D25893, D25896).
The sketch on folio 67 was used as the basis for Turner’s vignette illustration to volume 3 of Sir Walter Scott’s Poetical Works: Hermitage Castle circa 1832 (watercolour, private collection).1

Thomas Ardill
September 2009

1
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.428 no.1077.

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘Hermitage Castle, Lidderdale 1831 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2009, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-hermitage-castle-lidderdale-r1134259, accessed 25 April 2024.