Oil paint on canvas
Tate Britain
Tate Collection
Works with images
Works on display
Joseph Mallord William Turner
Turner Bequest
Oil paintings
Collection
Turner owned by Tate
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/joseph-mallord-william-turner-558" aria-label="More by Joseph Mallord William Turner" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Joseph Mallord William Turner</a>
Frosty Morning
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
adults
agriculture and fishing
agriculture, gardening & fishing
animals: mammals
architecture
cart
children
cow
farm labourer
farmland
frost
girl
gun, rifle
horse
hunter
landscape
literature (not Shakespeare)
literature and fiction
man
morning
objects
people
rabbit
road
seasons
society
spade
Thomson, James, ‘The Seasons’
times of the day
townscapes / man-made features
transport: land
weapons
weather
wheelbarrow
winter
work and occupations
<p>Painted with ‘open eyes’ is how French Impressionist Claude Monet described this painting when he saw it years after Turner’s death. It impressed viewers in Turner’s lifetime, too. Critics said it imitated the feeling of a cold wintry morning ‘to perfection’. Turner witnessed this scene of a ditch being cleared when travelling through Yorkshire in the north of England. We think that the girl, who has a hare draped over her shoulders to keep warm, is modelled on Turner’s eldest daughter, Evelina. She and her sister, Georgiana, were born to Sarah Danby, who never lived with Turner.</p><p><em>Gallery label, October 2023</em></p>
painting oil paint canvas
30 July 2001 – 23 June 2002
2002-06-23
30 July 2001 – 23 June 2002
2002-06-23
2001-07-30
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2001-07-30
Painting the English Landscape
Collection based display
5 August 2002 – 21 May 2007
2007-05-21
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2002-08-05
Turner at Tate Britain
Collection based display
6 October 2007 – 13 January 2008
2008-01-13
6 October 2007 – 13 January 2008
2008-01-13
2007-10-06
Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Ghent, Belgium)
http://www.gent.be/
2007-10-06
British Vision, Observation and Imagination in British Art, 1750 -1950
Loan-out
20 March 2009 – 10 August 2009
2009-08-10
20 March 2009
2009-03-20
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2009-03-20
Turner and Rothko Introduction
Collection based display
5 August 2010 – 17 April 2012
2012-04-17
5 August 2010 – 17 April 2012
2012-04-17
2010-08-05
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2010-08-05
Constable: Sketching from Nature
Collection based display
26 March 2015 – 27 May 2020
2020-05-27
27 November 2019 – 27 May 2020
2020-05-27
2019-11-27
Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong, China)
2015-03-26
British Landscape
Tate partnerships & programmes
1 May 2016 – 8 January 2017
2017-01-08
4 May 2016 – 18 September 2016
2016-09-18
2016-05-04
Caumont Art Centre (Aix-en-Provence, France)
7 October 2016 – 8 January 2017
2017-01-08
2016-10-07
Turner Contemporary (Margate, UK)
2016-05-01
JMW Turner: From Shade and Darkness, to Light and Colour
Loan-out
13 March 2023
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2023-03-13
Gallery 104
Collection based display
Frosty Morning
support: 1137 × 1746 mm
frame: 1385 × 2007 × 114 mm
Accepted by the nation as part of the <a href="/search?gid=999999781" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">Turner Bequest</a> 1856
<div class="text">
<p>Painted with ‘open eyes’ is how French Impressionist Claude Monet described this painting when he saw it years after Turner’s death. It impressed viewers in Turner’s lifetime, too. Critics said it imitated the feeling of a cold wintry morning ‘to perfection’. Turner witnessed this scene of a ditch being cleared when travelling through Yorkshire in the north of England. We think that the girl, who has a hare draped over her shoulders to keep warm, is modelled on Turner’s eldest daughter, Evelina. She and her sister, Georgiana, were born to Sarah Danby, who never lived with Turner.</p>
</div>

Display caption
2023-10-25T00:00:00
display-caption
DISPLAY_CAPTION
<p><b>127. </b>[<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-frosty-morning-n00492" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00492</span></a>]<b> Frosty Morning</b> Exh. 1813
<br/>
<br/>THE TATE GALLERY, LONDON (492)
<br/>Canvas, 44 3/4 × 68 3/4 (113·5 × 174·5)</p>
<p><b>Coll.</b> Turner Bequest 1856 (8, ‘Frost Scene’ 5'9" × 3'9"); transferred to the Tate Gallery 1953.</p>
<p><b>Exh.</b> R.A. 1813 (15); Turner's gallery 1835; Tate Gallery 1931 (57); Paris 1938 (141, repr.); New York, Chicago and Toronto 1946–7 (49, repr. pl. 40); Whitechapel 1953 (77); R.A. 1974 (18, repr.); R.A. 1974–5 (161, repr.); Leningrad and Moscow 1975–6 (16); Hamburg 1976 (22, repr.); <i>Turner in Yorkshire</i>, York City Art Gallery, June–July 1980 (34, repr.); Paris 1983–4 (22, repr. in colour); Birmingham 1984.</p>
<p><b>Lit.</b> Thornbury 1862, i, pp. 170–71, 295; 1877, pp. 121–2, 431; Hamerton 1879, p. 149; Monkhouse 1879, p. 89; Bell 1901, pp. 63, 93 no. 128; Armstrong 1902, pp. 111–12, 222, repr. facing p. 112; Finberg 1910, pp. 61, 63–8; Whitley 1928, p. 211; Falk 1938, p. 43; Davies 1946, pp. 148–9, 185; Clare 1951, pp. 52–3, repr.; Finberg 1961, pp. 196, 229, 238, 252, 475 no. 183, pl. 15; Rothenstein and Butlin 1964, p. 27, pl. 51; Gage 1965, p. 79; Lindsay 1966, pp. 108, 114, 148; Lindsay 1966<sup>2</sup>, p. 58; Brill 1969, pp. 14–15, repr.; R. B. Beckett (ed.), <i>John Constable's Correspondence</i> vi 1968, p. 21; Reynolds 1969, pp. 89–90, 106, colour pl. 67; Gaunt 1971, p. 6, colour pl. 13; Herrmann 1975, pp. 23, 229, colour pl. 58; Wilton 1979, p. 126, pl. 123; Gage 1980, pp. 64, 73, 290; David Hill, ‘A Frosty Morning: Turner in Yorkshire’, <i>Country Life</i> 25 December 1980, pp. 2402–3, pl. 5.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Exhibited with the following line:
<br/></p>
<p>‘The rigid hoar frost melts before his beam.’</p>
<p align="right">Thomson's Seasons
<br/></p>
<p>According to the younger Trimmer the picture immortalised Turner's ‘old crop-eared bay horse, or rather a cross between a horse and a pony’. ‘The “Frost Piece” was one of his favourites ... He said he was travelling by coach in Yorkshire, and sketched it <i>en route</i>. There is a stage-coach in the distance that he was on at the time. My father told me that when at Somerset House [in the 1813 R.A. Exhibition] it was much brighter and made a great sensation ... The girl with the hare over her shoulders, I have heard my father say reminded him of a young girl whom he occasionally saw at Queen Anne-street [Turner's gallery], and whom, from her resemblance to Turner, he thought a relation. The same female figure appears in his “Crossing the Brook” [No. 130, <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-crossing-the-brook-n00497" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00497</span></a>]]’ (Thornbury 1862, i, pp. 170–71). The reference to the girl is, as Lindsay has pointed out, to Evelina, one of Turner's two illegitimate daughters by the widow Sarah Danby. David Hill further suggests that the man with a gun is Walter Fawkes and the boy his son Hawkesworth. However, Turner would not have painted the figures, or indeed the <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/l/landscape" title="Glossary definition for 'Landscape'"><span>landscape</span></a> as a whole, on the spot and is more likely to have painted types, perhaps based on people he knew, rather than <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/portrait" title="Glossary definition for 'Portrait'"><span>portraits</span></a>. For Turner to combine a depiction of his best patron at the time with elements from his somewhat <i>sub rosa</i> private life seems highly unlikely.
<br/>
<br/>The picture was praised in the <i>Morning Chronicle</i> for 3 May 1813 and, more significantly, by Constable's great patron Archdeacon Fisher who singled it out as the only picture to be preferred to Constable's in the exhibition: ‘But then you need not repine at this decision of mine; you are a great man like Buonaparte, and are only beaten by a frost’ (Beckett, <i>loc. cit.</i>).
<br/>
<br/>In 1815 Ambrose Johns, arranging an exhibition in Plymouth, asked Turner to send this work and ‘Dido’ (probably No. 131 [<span>N00498</span>]; see Gage 1980, p. 64). However, Turner had already sent off <i>Jason</i> and <i>Bligh Sands</i>
(Nos. 19 [<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-jason-n00471" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00471</span></a>] and 87 [<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-fishing-upon-the-blythe-sand-tide-setting-in-n00496" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00496</span></a>]), writing of this picture, ‘The <i>Frostpiece</i>—I never thought of [?‘,’] as being generally wrong’ (letter of 4 November 1815, reprinted in Gage 1980, p. 64). In May 1818 Turner offered it to Dawson Turner for 350 guineas. Thornbury states that Trimmer's son had told him that Turner had once thought of giving the picture to Trimmer ‘who greatly prized it’. There is no evidence however that the picture ever left Turner's hands.
<br/>
<br/>That the picture was on view in Turner's gallery in 1835 is attested by the account in the <i>Spectator</i> for 26 April: ‘We have seen Turner in cool and warm effects, and here we admire him also in a wintry scene. The hard frosty ground, the naked trees, the cold, dead, white sky, and the pale, weak, yellow gleam of sunlight, that scarcely relieves the cheerless desolation, or lessens the cold of the air, are imitated with the most delicate truth. Here are no raw white masses of snow and black branches, but the true tone of nature is imitated to perfection, for the picture conveys the feeling of the season.’
<br/>
<br/>Claude Monet said of this picture, that it was ‘peint les yeux ouverts’ (George Moore, <i>Vale</i>, 1947, pp. 112–13, quoted in Gage, exh. cat., Paris 1983–4, p. 50).
<br/>
<br/>Some of the glazes of this picture have been lost with time. There is also some old staining round the cracks in the sky, perhaps from early repainting.</p>
<p>
<br/><b>Published in:</b>
<br/>Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, <i>The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner</i>, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984
<br/></p>

Catalogue entry
2004-09-22T00:00:00
catalogue-entry
CATALOGUE_ENTRY
adults agriculture and fishing agriculture, gardening & fishing animals: mammals architecture cart children cow farm labourer farmland frost girl gun, rifle horse hunter landscape literature and fiction literature (not Shakespeare) man morning objects people rabbit road seasons society spade Thomson, James, ‘The Seasons’ times of the day townscapes / man-made features transport: land weapons weather wheelbarrow winter work and occupations