It recently was brought to my attention that the Tate Gallery have various sketches now uploaded from their collection for viewing online. What a surprise it was to see that the world famous artist Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851 had visited Blantyre in 1834 and sketched the ruins of Bothwell Castle, Bothwell Bridge and Blantyre Priory.
When I say ‘sketch’, that is indeed what he did. The half dozen sketches are of such basic nature and so fluidic, they may even have been done whilst he was on the move, actually travelling past these points. There is no indication he stayed for any length of time and each sketch would literally have taken a couple of minutes at most.
The purpose of sketchbooks was to create subject matter which to later revisit and firm up a pencil or painting itself, based on that outline. They can be viewed in more detail and in their entirety at the following link.