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

These two sketches were made during Turner’s steamboat tour to Staffa from Tobermory. At the top of the page is a sketch which David Wallace-Hadrill and Janet Carolan suggest may either be Staffa as seen from the north, or considering the smaller islands to the right, Treshnish Point on Mull with the Treshnish Isles (see folio 42; D26821).1 Beneath is a sketch that has been identified as Loch na Keal, as seen from the mouth of the loch looking east with Ben More in the distance, its peaks obscured by clouds. This sketch would have been made following Turner’s visit to Staffa, as Turner remarked in a letter to James Lenox that having visited the island, the steamboat on which he was travelling was ‘driven for shelter into Loch Ulver’.2 There is no place called Loch Ulver, but Wallace-Hadrill and Carolan have suggested that Turner meant Loch na Keal to the east of the Isle of Ulva.3