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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Scotland 1831 > Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The River Esk, and Johnny Armstrong's Tower 1831

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The River Esk, and Johnny Armstrong's Tower’ 1831
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 62 Recto:
The River Esk, and Johnny Armstrong’s Tower 1831
D25883
Turner Bequest CCLXVI 62
Pencil on white wove paper, 187 x 114 mm
Inscribed in blue ink by John Ruskin ‘62’ top left running vertically and ‘342’ top right running vertically
Stamped in black ‘CCLXVI 62’ top right running vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
There are two sketches of the River Esk made from Gilnockie Bridge near the Hamlet of Hollows on this page, which was used with the sketchbook turned to the left. The top sketch looks north towards the peel tower that Turner and Sir Walter Scott referred to as Johnny Armstrong’s Tower, although it is more commonly known as Gilnockie or Hollows Tower. Turner painted the subject based on this sketch and the sketch on folio 62 verso (D25884), as an illustration to volume 3 of Sir Walter Scott’s Poetical Work: Johnnie Armstrong’s Tower circa 1832 (watercolour, Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati).1 In front of the tower is a faint outline of the roof of Hollows Mill, which is shown in a similar position in the final design. Turner slightly rearranged the elements of the picture in his composition for Scott, and set the viewpoint further back so that Gilnockie Bridge appeared in the foreground.
The second sketch on the page is of the Esk to the south of Gilnockie Bridge. One of the bridge’s buttresses and part of an arch is shown at the bottom left of the picture. It appears to the left of the river because the Esk turns east immediately after the bridge.
For further information on Turner’s sketches of the tower see folio 61 (D25881).

Thomas Ardill
September 2009

1
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.427 no.1073.

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘The River Esk, and Johnny Armstrong’s Tower 1831 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2009, 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-the-river-esk-and-johnny-armstrongs-tower-r1134250, accessed 29 April 2025.