The Castle from the Grassmarket was engraved by Henry Le Keux from A.W. Calcott’s design for the fourth number of Scott’s Provincial Antiquities. This page shows Turner’s version of the scene, which concentrates more on the area’s commercial activity than it does on its proximity to the castle or history as the site where condemned criminals were hanged. We look at a row of shops and businesses on the north side of the Grassmarket with the Castle Rock behind.
Turner has fastidiously inscribed the buildings with the names of their proprietors, although, unfortunately his illegible handwriting makes it difficult to be certain of the names, none of which seems to match the famous establishments of the Grassmarket; although ‘B’ may stand for ‘Black Bull’, a tavern that still exists and resembles the building in the centre of this drawing. Turner also inscribed names on sketches of Edinburgh High Street and the West Bow with Heriot’s Hospital on folio 52 verso (
D13412; CLXV 50a) and in the
Scotch Antiquities sketchbook (Tate
D13412,
D13697,
D13701–D13702,
D13708; Turner Bequest CLXVII 65a, 67a, 68, 69); many of these can be made out by the clearer lettering in Turner’s watercolour versions of the subjects:
Edinburgh High Street, circa 1818 (Yale Center for British Art)
1 and
Heriot’s Hospital, circa 1819 (National Gallery of Scotland).
2The inscription at the top of the page, ‘grass’, is easy to make out. The name written across the building in the centre of the picture may be ‘G[e]o[rge] Wright [?]Luther’ (or Heather), with ‘Crosbi studios’ or ‘stables’ written below it. The name at the bottom left may read ‘N Macarlow’. The inscription at the bottom centre of the page may describe two businesses: ‘[...] Maker’ and ‘Grocer’. The inscription at the bottom right looks like: ‘Durham | Horburgh | Shop’. Finally Turner seems to have added his own initials at the very right of the sketch, ‘JMW’. The letters ‘B’ and ‘W’ are also written on two of the buildings, either referring to the proprietors (such as ‘Black Bull’), or perhaps to the appearance of the buildings themselves, for example, ‘black’ and ‘white’, or ‘brick’ and ‘wooden’.
Although the sketch is mainly restricted to architectural outlines, he has included reminders of what the buildings are for such as a shop sign hanging from the building in the centre, and rectangular signs on the other buildings, as well as a series of lines and semicircles on the street outside one of the shops, which may represent barrels or crates waiting to be brought in. He has also captured the distinctive aspects of the architecture in this area of Edinburgh: the tall, narrow tenements with clerestory windows in the roof and crow-step gabling.
Walter Scott’s description of the Grassmarket for the
Provincial Antiquities concentrates on the area as ‘the place of public execution’,
3 a theme he took up that year in his novel
The Heart of Midlothian which opens with a description of the Grassmarket.
4At the top of this page, the drawing runs onto the page above (folio 50;
D13448; CLXV 50).
Thomas Ardill
November 2007
