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

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

Joseph Mallord William Turner Stirling: Holy Rude Parish Church and Mar's Works 1831

Image 1 of 2
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Stirling: Holy Rude Parish Church and Mar's Works’ 1831
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 8 Recto:
Stirling: Holy Rude Parish Church and Mar’s Works 1831
D26450
Turner Bequest CCLXX 8
Pencil on white wove paper, 125 x 201 mm
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ?‘angle’ centre, ‘cows’ bottom left, and various numbers on the building at the left
Inscribed in red ink by John Ruskin ‘8’ bottom left descending vertically
Stamped in black ‘CCLXX – 8’ bottom left descending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This detailed architectural sketch of the Mar’s Work and Holy Rude Parish Church was made from just outside the gate to the Mar’s Work, the ruin of a sixteenth-century mansion in Stirling. Turner shows the façade in detail, paying particular attention to the coats of arms above and either side of the doorway. A note in Turner’s hand to the left of the entrance may read ‘angle’ and the artist inscribed numbers at several points on the sketch, perhaps indicating measurements in inches of different parts of the building. To the left of the Mar’s Work is the apse of Holy Rude Parish Church with the tower of the church seen behind the mansion ruins to the right. The tower is shown again in a separate sketch at the bottom of the page. At the bottom left is a rough sketch with the inscription ‘Cows’ which David Wallace-Hadrill and Janet Carolan have pointed out is likely to refer to the Cowane Hospital which is just to the south of the church.1
Turner drew a very similar view of the Mar’s Works with the church and Cowane’s Hospital in 1834 in the Stirling and Edinburgh sketchbook (Tate D26361; Turner Bequest CCLXIX 54).
For references to further sketches made at Stirling, see folio 13 (D16460).

Thomas Ardill
June 2010

1
Wallace-Hadrill and Carolan 1990, p.16.

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘Stirling: Holy Rude Parish Church and Mar’s Works 1831 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2010, 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-stirling-holy-rude-parish-church-and-mars-works-r1134884, accessed 26 April 2024.