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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Scotland 1831 > Inverness Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Huntly Castle 1831

Image 1 of 2
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Huntly Castle’ 1831
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 146 Verso:
Huntly Castle 1831
D27225
Turner Bequest CCLXXVII 146a
Pencil on off-white wove paper, 163 x 104 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The castle ruin, sketched three times on this page (second, third and fourth down), has been identified by David Wallace-Hadrill and Janet Carolan as Huntly Castle, a mid-sixteenth-century palace just north of the town of Huntly, which Turner passed on his journey from Elgin to Aberdeen.1
The first sketch (the second sketch from the top) shows the castle with a single-arched bridge. The authors suggest that this is therefore a view from the approach to the west. Beneath is a close-up view from the south with the large drum-tower at the centre. The sketch at the bottom is from the south.
At the top of the page is a sketch of a bridge that Wallace-Hadrill and Carolan suggest is Fochabers Bridge over the River Spey, and which may be depicted again on folio 145 (D27223).

Thomas Ardill
May 2010

1
David Wallace-Hadrill and Janet Carolan, ‘Sketchbook CCLXXVII Inverness’, [circa 1991], Tate catalogue files, [unpaginated].

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘Huntly Castle 1831 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 2010, 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-huntly-castle-r1135592, accessed 26 September 2024.