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

This work is made from two pieces of paper, essentially worked separately. Peter Bower1 (1990) suggests that the lower part of the image was first painted on a lightweight wove white writing paper made by the Hollingworth & Balston partnership at Turkey Mill, Maidstone, Kent, along with a sky which Turner decided had to be discarded. His decision might have been an artistic one without precedent in the large number of works in the Turner Bequest, but Bower also suggests that the heavy, gum-rich washes employed in the foreground, which must have washed out much of the original glue size on the paper, and the thinner washes of a typical Turner sky, which would leave all the sizing intact and the paper very responsive to wetting, combined to make the lightweight paper cockle and wrinkle to an extent that made it impossible to continue. Thus Turner cut out the more finished lower half, retaining the crag of Calton Hill, the three arches of North Bridge carrying the road from Leith (outside the image and to the right) to the Old Town of Edinburgh, and the lower buildings of the Old Town. He laid it onto a sheet of heavier white paper of similar type, and then painted the rest of the Old Town rising towards the Castle, with the silhouette of Castle Rock seen through a misty atmosphere, and another sky.

The very golden yellow tonality is the result of extreme darkening of the paper due to light exposure, and complete loss of blue from the sky, for the same reason. The extreme edges of the paper were protected by a window mount. On the right edge, it is possible to see that the sky was a brighter blue over Calton Hill, and increasingly pale and cloudy towards the top of the paper. The left edge seems to suggest more cloudy greyness on the town side than on the right. The sun was glancing through to the right of Castle Rock, while the more pink-brown buildings at the lower end of the Old Town, and the very slightly red appearance of the left half of the sky, hint at quite dramatic lighting effects. The foreground and the vegetation on the crag of Calton Hill were presumably painted in mixed greens made from the same lost blue and a range of brown ochres. Only the ochres survive, against a much browner background than was intended. Indigo is the most likely candidate for the lost blue: Turner used in very frequently for skies and mixed greens at this date. Tiny highlights in white gouache, applied over much of North Bridge but placed in all areas of the image except the sky, could well have had more impact originally.

Bower2 suggests that the extreme darkening of the paper may have taken place because the original paper (that on the lower half of the image) was a ‘corrected white’ paper, which is to say, a paper made from predominantly white fibres, with indigo incorporated to counter the yellowness of the minority non-white fibres. These added fibres tended to derive from a low-quality source and were prone to darkening anyway: the use of all-white fibres implies a labour-intensive and more costly selection of all-white rags for making the batch of paper. Not much indigo would be needed to ‘correct’ the white for immediate sale. For the same light exposure, dark washes of a given colorant survive better. The fading of indigo will always be most rapid when it is applied thinly (as for many skies) or in low concentration among white paper fibres, which scatter light towards it from all sides. Here it could amount to complete fading. The extreme colour change makes it impossible in practice to see any surviving particles of indigo to support the idea of a ‘corrected white’ paper having been used, and Bower acknowledges that the colour change is extreme for this scenario. Another explanation could be that the paper was made with an early chlorine bleaching process, but Bower could dismiss this because the known maker did not use chlorine bleaching at this time. The third explanation, perhaps as likely as the first, is that the whole work has been subjected in the past to a chlorine bleaching treatment during restoration, a practice no longer carried out. Such a treatment would eliminate existing light-induced darkening of the paper for a time, at the later inevitable cost of worse darkening developing over time, even if the paper were subsequently stored in the dark.

This large watercolour was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1804. Turner based it on a pencil drawing (on the London art market in 1975)1 probably originally from the Smaller Fonthill sketchbook (Tate; Turner Bequest XLVIII), dating from 1801 when he visited Scotland for the first time. From Calton Hill, to the east of Edinburgh’s city centre, the view takes in the Old Town, Castle and North Bridge while most of the New Town is hidden by the hill on the right. The narrative and figures, including milkmaids, washerwomen and Scottish dancers performing a reel are reminiscent of the studies of figures and costume in the Scotch Figures sketchbook (Tate; Turner Bequest LIX) also used in 1801. Turner’s watercolour was exhibited in the same year as David Wilkie painted Pitlessie Fair (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), his first essay in the Scottish vernacular that made him famous after he moved to London in 1805. Significant as the figures are in Turner’s watercolour, it is broadly classical in its symmetry and golden, Claudean atmosphere.

A View from the Top of Calton Hill, Edinburgh had been the subject of the first-ever panorama, painted by Robert Barker in 1788. The full-size version, 25 feet (8 metres) in diameter, was exhibited in London at 28 Haymarket, and then repainted in oil for the Upper Circle of the Panorama, Leicester Square, where it was shown from 8 January 1804 until 5 June 1807. Turner’s choice of subject for the Royal Academy in 1804 cannot have been a coincidence and his sophisticated treatment, more evocative than topographical, might have been calculated to draw attention to the limitations of Barker’s more literal methods; or to challenge that painter’s hubristic claim to have invented an ‘IMPROVEMENT ON PAINTING, which relieves that sublime Art from a restraint it has ever laboured under’.2

In their early catalogue of Turner’s work, John Burnet and Peter Cunningham described this watercolour as

John Ruskin greatly admired the watercolour, describing it as ‘very noble’4 and as ‘the great National Gallery North Bridge drawing’.5 He considered it to be in Turner’s ‘finest manner, unaffected by ... weakness of minute execution’.6

Technical notes:

This watercolour was made on two different papers, one, on which most of the landscape composition is painted, being pasted down on top of the other. In his discussion of the work, Peter Bower illustrates where the join occurs by a white line. Bower believes both papers were probably made in Double Elephant size (40 x 27 in, 1067 x 730 mm). He identifies the paper used for the bottom half of the picture as a lightweight white wove writing paper, without watermark but probably made by William Balston and Finch and Thomas Robert Hollingworth at Turkey Mill, Maidstone, Kent, while the top half is a heavy rough-surfaced white wove drawing paper, again without watermark, from an unknown source.

Bower notes that while it was not unusual for artists to use overlapping papers in order to correct or rework areas of their compositions, this example seems to be unique in the Turner Bequest in being made on two different papers. In his opinion the whole composition was first painted on the smooth writing paper now seen in the bottom half; but then, finding the sky unsatisfactory, Turner cut the work in half, laying the lower portion on a larger sheet of heavier drawing paper on which he painted a new sky.

Finberg described this work as ‘Considerably injured by exposure to light’. Bower ascribes the damage both to fading of the colours, especially in areas where indigo was used in the blues and greens, and to discolouration of the papers, probably because indigo had also been used as a whitening agent during their manufacture. The whole work now has a pronounced yellowish tinge.

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