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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Scotland 1834 > Stirling and Edinburgh Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Douglas Castle, Lanarkshire 1834

Image 1 of 2
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Douglas Castle, Lanarkshire’ 1834
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 22 Verso:
Douglas Castle, Lanarkshire 1834
D26302
Turner Bequest CCLXIX 22a
Pencil on off-white wove paper, 190 x 113 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the sketchbook turned to the right the page has been divided into three separate sketches. The top and middle sketches depict, not Bothwell Castle as Finberg suggested,1 but the ruins of the old Douglas Castle in Lanarkshire as seen from the west. Standing on a rise above the Douglas Water, shown at the left of each sketch, is all that remains of the late seventeenth-century castle: the round corner-tower of the encircling wall. Turner made further sketches of this structure on folios 21 verso and 22 (D26300, D26301) where he also drew the mid eighteenth-century castle that replaced it. For more information about Turner’s visit to Douglas Castle see folio 21 verso.
At the bottom of the page is a sketch of a castle on a hill with turreted defensive walls running down the side of the hill. David Wallace-Hadrill has suggested that this may be Stirling Castle (see folio 51; D26355 for comparison).2

Thomas Ardill
October 2010

1
Finberg 1909, II, p.865.
2
DWH, [CCLXIX Checklist], [circa 1991], Tate catalogue files, unpaginated MS.

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘Douglas Castle, Lanarkshire 1834 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, October 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-douglas-castle-lanarkshire-r1136232, accessed 21 September 2024.