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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Bass Rock c.1824

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
The Bass Rock c.1824
D35973
Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 130
Watercolour on white wove paper, 219 x 294 mm
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram towards bottom right
Inscribed in red ink ‘130’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCCLXIV – 130’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
In a first attempt to identify the subject of this ‘colour beginning’ described by Finberg as a ‘Sea piece: Stormy Evening’,1 John Gage tentatively suggested Staffa,2 the rocky island of the Inner Hebrides which Turner visited on his Scottish tour of 1831; he exhibited the loosely comparable painting Staffa, Fingal’s Cave the following year, with its dramatic sunset and towering clouds dwarfing a steamship on a dark sea (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven).3 In fact, the work appears rather to be a contemporary variant of Tate D25327 (Turner Bequest CCLXIII 205), a study related to The Bass Rock, a watercolour of about 1824 (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight)4 showing the island in the Firth of Forth, which was engraved in 1826 for Walter Scott’s Provincial Antiquities of Scotland (see the Introduction to this section; Tate impressions: T04499–T04501, T06066).
While the finished design appears to rely particularly on 1822 drawings from the south as noted under D25327, Eric Shanes has stated that the version here is based on two of the many views in the 1818 Bass Rock and Edinburgh sketchbook (Tate D13326, D13330; Turner Bequest CLXV 3a, 5a),5 from a more south-easterly angle, although the correlations are not exact and the differences more perhaps on account of the looseness of the two colour studies than deliberate changes of viewpoint. Shanes has suggested that the marks below the middle of the rock may indicate ‘a foundering vessel’,6 perhaps prefiguring the prominent wreckage in the foreground of the finished design.
As Katrina Thomson has put it, Turner is also ‘playing with different effects of atmosphere and light’,7 most obviously in showing a yellow and red sunset sky to the left of the rock8 (with undiluted red test strokes at the top right), as opposed to the strong blues of the lightning-riven, stormy sky opted for in the end.
1
Finberg 1909, II, p.1184.
2
Gage 1974, p.46.
3
Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984, pp.198–9 p.347, pl.350 (colour).
4
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.426 no.1069, pl.173 (colour).
5
See Shanes 1997, p.57.
6
Ibid.
7
Thomson 1999, p.31.
8
Ibid., p.94; see also Shanes 1997, p.57.
Verso:
Blank

Matthew Imms
July 2016

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Bass Rock c.1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2016, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, February 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-bass-rock-r1184340, accessed 28 March 2024.