This drawing, although not highly finished, is certainly more carefully composed than many of the quick sketches in this book, and is one of the few drawings in which Turner depicted the weather (see
Tour of Scotland 1818 Tour Introduction; also folio 11 verso;
D13342; CLXV 11a for another drawing of clouds and the Bass Rock). The rocky outcrops in the foreground frame the drawing and also point to the main subject – Bass Rock – to the right. The rock labelled ‘W stack’ in the bottom right corner helps to balance the composition, and the top half of the picture is filled by a wide expanse of sky with some fascinating low cloud formations. Turner has written ‘light’ across an area of cloud, and a few lines of hatching are enough to indicate a darker area. In Turner’s watercolour of
Bass Rock, circa 1824 (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight),
1 clouds are again a major feature of the composition, allowing Turner to make the sky as pictorially fascinating as the sea and rock, and to explore the relationship of white and blue across the entire picture. The calm of this sketch, however, is replaced in the watercolour by a raging storm, complete with lightning bolt.