The grandeur of the building is emphasised by the arc of a rainbow, rendered with stippling to evoke a diffuse and hazy spectrum. Curator James Hamilton writes that during the 1820s ‘the refraction of light and the nature of rainbows was being extensively studied’ principally by the physicist David Brewster (1781–1868). Turner’s Victorian biographer Walter Thornbury writes of the debates the artist had with friends on the subject of light and the science behind the spectrum.
3 These were friends from an Edinburgh social circle which Turner entered in 1818, according to Hamilton.
4 The Revd James Skene, author of the article on ‘Painting’ in Brewster’s
Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1808–30), includes observations which seem to give direct evidence of Turner’s knowledge of contemporary research into this field. Skene writes: ‘aided by the discoveries daily making in the mysteries of light, [Turner’s] scrutinising genius seems to tremble on the verge of some new discovery in colour, which may prove of the first importance of art’.
5 On an aesthetic level, the rainbow, Eric Shanes writes, is a reminder that ‘Turner’s imagination was never constrained by the parameters of the “everyday” world’.
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