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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Innerwick Castle, East Lothian 1831

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 23 Recto:
Innerwick Castle, East Lothian 1831
D25682
Turner Bequest CCLXV 23
Pencil on white wove paper, 59 x 96 mm
Inscribed in red ink by John Ruskin ‘23’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCLXV 23’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
David Wallace-Hadrill has suggested that this sketch may be of Hailes Castle, near East Linton in East Lothian.1 The sketch does to some extent resemble Hailes from the south, but a sketch on folio 24 (D25684), obviously of the same structure, can be confidently identified as Innerwick Castle from the south-west, making this a more probable identification of the present sketch. Both are recognisable from a photograph of the castle ruins held in the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland archive.2 There is also a similar view in the Abbotsford sketchbook (Tate D25988; Turner Bequest CCLXVII 36).
For references to further sketches of Innerwick Castle, see folio 8 (D25655).

Thomas Ardill
September 2009

1
David Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Berwick CCLXV checklist’, [circa 1992], Tate catalogue files.
2
‘Innerwick Castle’, Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (website), accessed May 2010, < http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/58912/details/innerwick+castle/ >.

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘Innerwick Castle, East Lothian 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-innerwick-castle-east-lothian-r1134046, accessed 20 September 2024.