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

The sketches on this page, inscribed ‘Dalkeith’ by Turner, show a view of the town and Montagu Bridge. The most prominent feature of the town is the church, the steeple of which has been somewhat exaggerated in size. Turner has also drawn a detail of the spire, its slatted lucarne window and cross-shaped finial. The town of Dalkeith and its church were both subjects illustrated for Scott’s Provincial Antiquities so it is likely that Turner visited and sketched them in case he was asked to provide designs of these subjects (in the event, Henry Le Keux engraved Dalkeith after Revd John Thomson, and George Cooke engraved Dalkeith Church after A.W. Calcott.) Robert Adams’s Montagu Bridge was erected in 1792 in the Duke of Buccleuch’s Dalkeith Estate (now County Park).