| Object | “Staffa: Fingal’s Cave,” by J.M.W. Turner |
|---|---|
| Date | 1831-1832 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Where to find | Yale Center for British Art |
What to know: Amid stormy weather, British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) set off on a steamboat for Staffa, a small island off the coast of Scotland. Its hexagonal basalt columns, forged by prehistoric volcano eruptions, had long captured the imagination of Romantic artists — particularly Fingal’s Cave, named after a hero of Gaelic mythology.
Turner, known for infusing natural landscapes with intense emotion, dramatized this encounter in “Staffa: Fingal’s Cave.” On the left, the mouth of Fingal’s Cave is bathed in light; to the right, a steamboat — a symbol of the then-ongoing Industrial Revolution — sits on choppy waves amid dark clouds. This clash of natural power and human industry, mythology and modernity, is intensified by Turner’s layering of thin glazes on thick impasto — a technique that heightens his dramatic contrasts.
“Staffa: Fingal’s Cave,” by J.M.W. Turner
From the expert: “In Turner’s time, Staffa was associated with the Gaelic hero, Fingal, as described in James Macpherson’s ‘Ossian,’ which developed traditional Scottish Gaelic tales into an epic poem,” said Lucinda Lax, interim head of the Yale Center for British Art’s curatorial division. “Turner was deeply interested in poetry and attempted to write his own epic poem, ‘The Fallacies of Hope.’ The fragments we have of this work suggest that Turner saw the world in quite mythological terms: as a great drama where hope and tragedy, ambition and hubris, were all bound up together. Turner’s ability to see this intensity in modern life underlies much of the emotional power of his most ambitious works.”
A Poetic Voyage: Turner’s visit to Scotland was prompted by poetry. As the illustrator for Sir Walter Scott’s “Poetical Works,” including “Lord of the Isles,” which mentions Staffa, Turner traveled to the island for inspiration. In the Royal Academy’s 1832 exhibition catalogue, Turner’s entry for “Staffa: Fingal’s Cave” quoted Scott’s poem:
Nor of a theme less solemn tells
The mighty surge that ebbs and swells
And still, between each awful pause,
From the high vault an answer draws.
