Turner’s habit as an artist was to make sketching tours in the summers. Filling sketchbooks
to produce material from which to work up finished watercolours and in 1797 he was traveling
in Northumberland and he made his first visit to Scotland.
He came across and drew the abbeys in the borders. Famous sites like Kelso, Jedburgh,
Melrose. He wanted to paint sublime mountain scenery which of course there’s an abundance
of in Scotland and so in 1801 he embarked upon an extended tour.
Turner’s pictures of Scotland embrace a whole range of subject matter. He produced
a series of large pencil drawings which explore the Scottish Highland landscape in wonderful
atmospheric detail. He produced taught commissioned watercolours on specific subjects like Heriots
hospital, like famous castles and abbeys; and he was also interested in modern life
you see steamers appearing in his pictures which was quite unusual for the time.
He was commissioned by the engineer Robert Stevenson to produce a watercolour of the
Bell Rock Lighthouse, which he actually did based on drawings by another artist and on
Stevenson’s wonderfully atmospheric description of what it’s like to be at the Bell Rock
lighthouse in a storm and from Turners watercolour you can absolutely see how his lifetime painting
the sea made him visualise that experience.
Turners relationship with Walter Scott began in 1818 when Scott and his publisher Robert
Cadell asked Turner to be one of the artists who would produce illustrations for Scott’s
‘Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland’ and this was intended
to be a 12 part serial publication with high quality illustrations by a number of artists;
of whom Turner was by far the most famous. They knew that having Turner on the project
would increase their circulation.
And this was actually the start of a long working relationship with Scott and in 1831
Turner came back to Scotland to stay with Scott at Abbotsford. We have two vignettes
of Abbotsford in the Vaughan Bequest at the Scottish National Gallery, one of them shows
the waterfall Rhymer's Glen on the Abbotsford estate and it was obviously painted after
Scott’s death because it was known to be a favourite spot of Scott’s and his walking
stick is propped against the bench by the side of the stream and this is Turners really
sort of poignant memorial to Scott.
Turner made a number of royal paintings, predominately after he’d returned from trips to Scotland.
He did paint oils of the visit of George IV to Edinburgh, perhaps in the hope that he
would get a royal commission to produce a grand worked up series of these which unfortunately
didn’t happen. But perhaps his most famous oil that resulted from a trip to Scotland
is his wonderful atmospheric late picture of Fingals Cave on Staffa. The captain of
The captain of the steamer Turner was on agreed to
circle the island and to allow him to land briefly
and on the last circuit of the island Turner describes the sun ‘breaking through, looking
angry through the rainy sky’ and he created this amazing, intense, visionary painting.
This incredibly atmospheric late oil.
Five of the 38 watercolours in the Vaughan bequest are views of Scotland and Henry Vaughan
bequeathed this amazing group of watercolours to the Scottish National Gallery in 1900 with
the stipulation that they should only be shown all at once, free of charge ad in the month
of January, because that’s when daylight is at its weakest. Vaughan was very conscious