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

This is one of two drawings in this sketchbook of the view along Edinburgh High Street looking west. While folio 64 verso (D13695; CLXVII 61a) shows the view from just east of the Tron Kirk, this present sketch is from further west towards Canongate so that Tron Kirk and St Giles’s Cathedral are seen further up the street. In both sketches Turner takes one of the street’s well heads as the focus for the foreground of his picture. As these were the only means until the 1820s by which the inhabitants of Edinburgh’s Old Town could get water they became local meeting points.1 Again the well head is surrounded by a crowd with a row of jugs and pales to collect the water – a motif Turner adopted in the foreground of his watercolour High Street, Edinburgh, circa 1818 (Yale Center for British Art, USA).2 There are also several carts on the High Street. Another compositional similarity is the flight of steps at the right of the picture, and the doorways of the north side of the street. The inscriptions refer to the names of shops and establishments.