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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Scotland 1831 > Abbotsford Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Hailes Castle, East Linton 1831

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Hailes Castle, East Linton’ 1831
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 24 Verso:
Hailes Castle, East Linton 1831
D25971
Turner Bequest CCLXVII 24a
Pencil on off-white wove writing paper, 113 x 185 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Hailes Castle lies about a mile and a half south-west of the town of East Linton between Dunbar and Haddington. Turner visited it on his way to Haddington on 12 or 13 August 1831. Although Hailes is now in a more ruinous state than it was in Turner’s time, this sketch is identifiable by comparison with a drawing by Alexander Archer, to which it bears a close resemblance.1
The view is from the north-east and includes the River Tyne in the foreground. There are further views on folios 35 verso, 43 verso, 44 verso, 45, 47 verso and 80 (D25987, D25999, D26001, D26002, D26007, D26072; CCLXVII 35a, 43a, 44a, 45, 47, 82), and a very small and slight sketch in the Berwick sketchbook (Tate D25683; Turner Bequest CCLXV 23a).
Finberg wrongly identified this sketch as Craigmillar Castle owing to its proximity to a sketch of that building on folio 25 (D25972; CCLXVII 25).2 Wilton’s suggestion that this is the basis for Turner’s watercolour of Craigmillar Castle, engraved for volume 23 of Sir Walter Scott’s Prose Work is therefore erroneous; the work was in fact based on a sketch made in 1818 (Tate D13707; Turner Bequest CLXVII 67a).
There is a light brown stain at the centre left of the page.

Thomas Ardill
September 2009

1
Alexander Archer, Hailes Castle: General View from the Northeast, collection date 1836, Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, accessed September 2009, http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/56207/digital_images/hailes+castle/.
2
Finberg 1909, II, p.858.

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘Hailes Castle, East Linton 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-hailes-castle-east-linton-r1134341, accessed 19 April 2024.