George IV at St Giles’s, Edinburgh

George IV went to Edinburgh in August 1822, the first reigning monarch to set foot in Scotland in well over a century, and Walter Scott stage-managed the fortnight into a pageant of tartan and processions. Turner travelled up to sketch it, planning a series of paintings and the profitable engravings that would follow. He got himself a ticket to the king's service at St Giles's on 25 August, along with the painters Wilkie, Collins and Allan, and sat through the whole thing without drawing. He went back to the church on another day to draw the empty interior, then filled it with the congregation from memory. The series never happened. He dropped the scheme, and this panel is the one that came nearest to finished. It stayed in his studio until he died and passed to the nation in 1856 with the rest of his bequest.