Joseph Mallord William Turner Bothwell Bridge, Lanarkshire with the Parish Church in the Distance 1834
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 31 Recto:
Bothwell Bridge, Lanarkshire with the Parish Church in the Distance 1834
D26319
Turner Bequest CCLXIX 31
Turner Bequest CCLXIX 31
Pencil on off-white wove paper, 113 x 190 mm
Inscribed in blue ink by John Ruskin ‘31’ bottom left inverted and ‘340’ top left inverted
Stamped in black ‘CCLXIX 31’ top left inverted
Inscribed in blue ink by John Ruskin ‘31’ bottom left inverted and ‘340’ top left inverted
Stamped in black ‘CCLXIX 31’ top left inverted
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
References
1909
A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.II, p.865, CCLXIX 31, as ‘Town on hill.’.
1990
Dr David Wallace-Hadrill and Janet Carolan, ‘Turner’s Sketches North of Stirling’, Turner Studies: His Art and Epoch 1775 – 1851, Vol.10 No.1, Summer 1990, p.12.
Sketches on folios 31–33 (D26319–D26324) depict Bothwell Bridge, a seventeenth-century, four-span bridge that crosses the River Clyde from Hamilton to Bothwell in Lanarkshire. The Battle of Bothwell Bridge took place in 1679 on a site just north or the structure, and it was presumably this event that prompted Turner’s interest in the subject. The battle is the subject of Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, 1816, one of the so-called Waverley Novels, a new collected edition of which Turner had been commissioned to illustrate. Turner’s sketches focus on the bridge rather than the fairly featureless battlefield.1
Turner visited Bothwell during a tour of the county of Lanarkshire on 19 September 1834; see Tour of Scotland for Scott’s Prose Works 1834 Tour Introduction. The sequence of sketches in this book suggests that he initially passed through the town on his way to Boswell Castle (folio 26; D26309) without making any sketches. He returned, however, and made his first sketch on the present page. From Bothwell Turner headed to Glasgow.
Drawn with the sketchbook inverted, this view was taken from the south side of the bridge and looks north across the bridge and the River Clyde towards the town of Bothwell. David Wallace-Hadrill, who identified this sketch, has noted that the tower of Bothwell Parish Church was built in 1833,2 a fact that proved that this sketch was made during Turner’s 1834 tour of Scotland, and therefore that the sketchbook belongs to this tour, rather than the 1831 tour as Finberg had assumed.3 There is another sketch of the church tower on the inside back cover of this sketchbook (D41048).
Thomas Ardill
October 2010
How to cite
Thomas Ardill, ‘Bothwell Bridge, Lanarkshire with the Parish Church in the Distance 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