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

There are two sketches on this page: the base of Nelson’s Monument on Calton Hill, and a study of a woman carrying a basket on her back and wearing a tartan skirt, the pattern of which is only partially drawn.

The sketch of Nelson’s Monument is very slight, and Finberg’s identification as ‘Calton Hill’ is presumably based on the more easily identifiable sketches on the previous and following pages in this sketchbook. The combination of castellated base, central tower, and its location on the edge of a hill all also point to Nelson’s Monument as the subject. Turner sketched the building in more detail elsewhere in this sketchbook (folios 54 verso, 61, 62 verso; D13416, D13429, D13432; CLXV 52a, 59, 60a).

The figure, seen from behind and carrying a basket on her back, takes a stance that Turner draws several times in this sketchbook. There are similar figures in this (folio 53; D13413; CLXV 51) and in the Edinburgh, 1818 sketchbook (folio 67; Tate D13579; Turner Bequest CLXVI 67), and an almost identical figure, though a little less stooped, stands at the edge of a group of conversing women on the left of Turner’s High Street, Edinburgh design for the Provincial Antiquities, circa 1818 (watercolour, Yale Centre for British Art).1 Finberg reads Turner’s inscription as ‘coal’, and so assumes that this is what the woman is carrying.2 However, the word looks more like ‘coaly’, and this could provide an alternative reading. Coaly, more often spelled ‘coley’ and sometimes called ‘coalfish’, is a member of the cod family, and a type of fish that is caught off the east coast of Scotland during the autumn months. It is not clear from the High Street, Edinburgh watercolour or engraving whether she is carrying coal, fish, or, indeed either.