Wallace-Hadrill and Carolan suggest that ‘it is perhaps from approximately this south-easterly viewpoint that Turner envisaged the cliffs of Staffa which rise dimly from the left side of the oil’
2 Staffa, Fingal’s Cave exhibited 1832 (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection).
3 In the painting, however, the island and cave are seen from the south-west, looking north-east to the southern point of the islands with the cave entrance at the right. Turner did not make a sketch of this view of the island. However, there was a model for this view in William Daniell’s aquatint,
Entrance to Fingal’s Cave, Staffa 1814–25 (Tate
T02795), which Turner is likely to have been familiar with. Like Daniell, Turner even included a seagull and several shags in the painting. Incidentally, the position of the sun in the oil painting is in the east, meaning that it should, if we are sticklers for such things, be a sunrise rather than a sunset as John Gage suggested.
4 However, a setting sun is what Turner saw – ‘The sun getting close to the horizon, burst through the rain-cloud’ –
5 and is what fits best with the theme of the painting. As Wallace-Hadrill and Carolan put it, ‘This is no more a topographical painting than is the Great Western Railway painting, “Rain Steam and Speed”. This is a painting of cloud, waves and rock daunting a little steamboat, initially stimulated by Turner’s experience of Staffa.’
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