Linlithgow Palace

Linlithgow Palace was already a burnt-out shell when Turner painted it around 1806. Sixty years earlier, government troops chasing the last Jacobite rising had quartered there and left it in flames, and the birthplace of Mary, Queen of Scots was never roofed again. Turner had toured Scotland and come back with sketches of exactly this kind of grand wreck standing over still water. He sets the ruin high and golden in the evening light, and down at the loch he puts small ordinary figures, a man with dogs, someone fishing, going about a quiet afternoon beneath all that lost history. The warm haze he wraps it in owes a good deal to the old landscapes of Claude that Turner was studying and trying to outdo.