Joseph Mallord William Turner The Angel Troubling the Pool c.1845
Joseph Mallord William Turner,
The Angel Troubling the Pool
c.1845
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
The Angel Troubling the Pool c.1845
D36120
Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 273
Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 273
Pencil and watercolour on white wove paper, 228 x 290 mm
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram towards bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCCLXIV – 237’ bottom right
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram towards bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCCLXIV – 237’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Exhibition history
1898
Victoria and Albert Museum, 1898–1908 (no catalogue).
1990
From Venice to the Alps: Watercolours from the Turner Bequest, Tate Gallery, London, April–June 1990 (no catalogue, as ‘A Lake among Mountains, with Angels’).
1993
Turner: The Final Years: Watercolours 1840–1851, Tate Gallery, February–May 1993.
1993
Robert Upstone, Turner: The Final Years: Watercolours 1840–1851, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1993 (42, as ‘The Angel Troubling the Pool’, c.1845, reproduced).
2009
Water Colours: From the Source to the Sea, Tate Britain, London, August 2009–July 2010 (no catalogue, as ‘The Angel Troubling the Pool’, c.1845).
2014
Late Turner, Tate Britain, London, September 2014–January 2015, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, February–May 2015, de Young, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, June–September 2015, Art Gallery of Ontario Toronto, October 2015–January 2016 (10, as ‘The Angel Troubling the Pool’, c.1845, reproduced in colour).
References
1830
A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.II, p.1195, CCCLXIV 273, as ‘The angel troubling the pool’, after c.1830.
1970
N[icholas] A. Serota, ‘J.M.W. Turner’s Alpine Tours’, unpublished MA Report, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London 1970, pp.131, as from proposed ‘Goldau to Bellinzona’ sketchbook, 141 note 8.
1993
Evelyn Joll, ‘Robert Upstone, “Turner: the Final Years. Watercolours 1840–1851”’, Turner Society News, no.64, August 1993, p.12.
1993
Robert Upstone, Sketchbooks of the Romantics, reprint ed., London 1993, reproduced in colour p.53 (Upstone 1993a).
1845
Robert Upstone, Turner: The Final Years: Watercolours 1840–1851, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1993, p.54 no.42, as ‘The Angel Troubling the Pool’, c.1845, reproduced (Upstone 1993b).
1997
Eric Shanes, Turner’s Watercolour Explorations 1810–1842, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1997, p.99 Appendix I ‘Literary and Book Illustrations’.
2005
Jan Piggott, ‘“A Sea of Blood”: Turner and Napoleon: The 2005 Kurt Pantzer Memorial Lecture, Part I’, Turner Society News, no.100, August 2005, p.15 note 39.
1845
Sam Smiles in David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon and Smiles (eds.), Late Turner, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2014, p.72 no.10, as ‘The Angel Troubling the Pool’, c.1845, reproduced in colour p.73.
As Robert Upstone has observed: ‘Uniquely, Turner has here adapted a watercolour of the Alps to include a biblical subject’.1 He notes that the subject is from St John’s Gospel, which relates:
Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered; waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had. And a certain man was there, which had an infirmity thirty and eight years. When Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that case, he saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole? The impotent man answered him, Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me. Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. And immediately the man was made whole, and took up his bed, and walked: and on the same day was the sabbath.2
Turner’s subject appears to relate to the early part of this passage, as Finberg recognised in first assigning the subject.3 Upstone notes that ‘troubling’ here means ‘to stir up the waters to make them thick or muddy. Turner has moved the site from Jerusalem to the Alps. A queue of sick people can be seen, headed by a man with a stick, who leans on a companion.’4
Jan Piggott has used the work as an example of how ‘Turner not only painted biblical subjects: his associational mind made use of biblical allusion and analogy more than is usually acknowledged’,5 as in this ‘late Alpine sketch’, where ‘the healing Bethesda comes to Turner’s mind in looking at a lake’.6 Sam Smiles has developed the last point, considering the ‘religiously inflamed situation in Switzerland in 1844 and 1845’ which pitched secularists against Catholics,7 but thinking it more ‘likely that the image has a personal meaning, triggered by an experience in Switzerland that had reminded [Turner] of the decline of his health as he approached seventy’;8 another possibility is a meditation on the worsening disfigurement of his long-term London housekeeper, Hannah Danby.9
Nicholas Serota10 and Evelyn Joll11 have speculated on a link with Turner’s apocalyptic painting of The Angel Standing in the Sun, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1846 (Tate N00550).12 See also Tate D27595 (Turner Bequest CCLXXX 78) in the present section. In considering Turner’s annual Swiss tours of 1841–4, Serota proposed a notional ‘Goldau to Bellinzona’ sketchbook comprising separate sheets from various sections of the Turner Bequest and other collections, some watermarked 1841, among which he and included the present work on the basis of its matching size.13 The setting of the apparently conventional topographical background of mountains, with a tower or spire silhouetted in the valley to the right, remains to be established.
The verso, with calculations and watercolour tests, is Tate D36121 (Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 273v).
Technical notes:
There is some pencil underdrawing. Extensive scratching out and rubbing is evident on and around the figures, while a perfunctory rippled line has been lightly scratched through the dark water towards the bottom left.
Matthew Imms
August 2016
How to cite
Matthew Imms, ‘The Angel Troubling the Pool c.1845 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 2016, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, February 2017, https://www