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>
Sunrise a Castle on a Bay Solitude
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
architecture
bay
castle
cliff
hill
landscape
military
seascapes and coasts
sunrise
times of the day
tree
<p>This unfinished painting revisits a composition from Turner’s ‘Liber Studiorum’ (‘Book of Studies’). In this set of prints, he classified his landscapes into six types: Architectural, Historical, Mountainous, Marine, Pastoral and E.P. This composition is from the category E.P., meaning Elevated or Epic Pastoral. Pastoral art showed an idealised view of the countryside. Turner’s E.P. celebrated the pastoral art of French painter Claude Lorrain (c.1604/5–82), who depicted the countryside around Rome. This composition pays homage to Claude’s ‘Landscape with Psyche outside the Palace of Cupid’, now at the National Gallery, London.</p><p><em>Gallery label, October 2023</em></p>
painting oil paint canvas
18 June 2001 – 14 July 2002
2002-07-14
18 June 2001 – 14 July 2002
2002-07-14
2001-06-18
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2001-06-18
From Studio to Gallery: Sketches in the Turner Bequest
Collection based display
1 December 2002 – 31 March 2003
2003-03-31
13 December 2002 – 17 March 2003
2003-03-17
2002-12-13
Musée des Beaux-Arts (Nancy, France)
2002-12-01
Turner and Claude Lorrain
Tate partnerships & programmes
1 June 2007 – 15 March 2009
2009-03-15
1 June 2007
2007-06-01
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2007-06-01
Interrupted Visions: Oil Sketches 1820s-1840s
Collection based display
20 March 2009 – 3 August 2009
2009-08-03
20 March 2009
2009-03-20
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2009-03-20
Painting Set Free: Turner at the Museum of Modern Art, New York 1966
Collection based display
22 February 2010 – 19 September 2010
2010-09-19
21 September 2009 – 3 January 2010
2010-01-03
2009-09-21
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
22 February 2010 – 23 May 2010
2010-05-23
2010-02-22
Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais (Paris, France)
21 June 2010 – 19 September 2010
2010-09-19
2010-06-21
Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid, Spain)
2010-02-22
Turner and the Masters
Loan-out
14 March 2012 – 5 June 2012
2012-06-05
14 March 2012 – 5 June 2012
2012-06-05
2012-03-14
National Gallery (London, UK)
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk
2012-03-14
Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude
Loan-out
10 September 2014 – 20 September 2015
2015-09-20
10 September 2014 – 25 January 2015
2015-01-25
2014-09-10
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2014-09-10
Late Turner: Painting Set Free
Exhibition
11 July 2016 – 15 March 2020
2020-03-15
11 July 2016 – 15 March 2020
2020-03-15
2016-07-11
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2016-07-11
Clore 103 In the Studio
Collection based display
6 April 2020 – 27 November 2022
2022-11-27
6 April 2019
2019-04-06
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2020-04-06
Clore 102
Collection based display
13 March 2023
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2023-03-13
Gallery 105
Collection based display
Sunrise, a Castle on a Bay: ‘Solitude’
support: 908 × 1219 mm
frame: 1071 × 1377 × 86 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>This unfinished painting revisits a composition from Turner’s ‘Liber Studiorum’ (‘Book of Studies’). In this set of prints, he classified his landscapes into six types: Architectural, Historical, Mountainous, Marine, Pastoral and E.P. This composition is from the category E.P., meaning Elevated or Epic Pastoral. Pastoral art showed an idealised view of the countryside. Turner’s E.P. celebrated the pastoral art of French painter Claude Lorrain (c.1604/5–82), who depicted the countryside around Rome. This composition pays homage to Claude’s ‘Landscape with Psyche outside the Palace of Cupid’, now at the National Gallery, London.</p>
</div>

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2023-10-25T00:00:00
display-caption
DISPLAY_CAPTION
<p>[from]<b> Nos. 509–19: Unfinished Paintings, mainly of <i>Liber Studiorum</i> Subjects, <i>c.</i> 1840–50.</b></p>
<p>THIS group of late <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/painting" title="Glossary definition for 'Painting'"><span>paintings</span></a>, roughly similar in size, style, colouring and degree of finish, is remarkable in being based largely on compositions used much earlier by Turner for the <i>Liber Studiorum</i>. Only <i>Sunrise, with a Boat between Headlands</i> (No. 516 [<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-sunrise-with-a-boat-between-headlands-n02002" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N02002</span></a>]) and <i><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> with River and Distant Mountains</i> (No. 517) seem to be entirely new inventions. In addition all but three of the remaining paintings are of subjects that Turner classified as ‘E.P.’, almost certainly ‘elevated pastoral’. Of the others, one, <i>Norham Castle, Sunrise</i> (No. 512 [<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-norham-castle-sunrise-n01981" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N01981</span></a>]) is a ‘P’ or ‘pastoral’ subject, <i>Inverary Pier</i> (No. 519) is an ‘M’ or ‘marine’ subject, while <i>Europa and the Bull</i> (No. 514) is based on a detail of the frontispiece, which was not given a classification. The degree of dependence on the <i>Liber</i> model varies. In the case of <i>Landscape with a River and Bay in the Distance</i>
(No. 509), Chepstow Castle, which forms the main topographical motif of the <i>Liber</i> plate, ‘The Junction of the Severn and the Wye’, is omitted, but in two other cases, rather surprisingly, Turner makes the late oil more topographically specific than the <i>Liber</i> plate, <i>Landscape with Walton Bridges</i> (No. 511) and <i>The Ponte delle Torri, Spoleto</i> (No. 518 [<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-the-ponte-delle-torri-spoleto-n02424" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N02424</span></a>]).</p>
<p>All the paintings are unfinished and seem to be in the state in which Turner took such unfinished works into the Royal <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/a/academy" title="Glossary definition for 'Academy'"><span>Academy</span></a> or the British Institution before completing them on varnishing days; see in particular John Burnet's description of such unfinished pictures as being ‘divided into large masses of blue, where the water or sky was to come, and [with] the other portions laid out in broad orange yellow, falling into delicate brown where the trees and landscapes were to be placed’ (Burnet 1852, p. 100; 1859, pp. 84–5), and Rippingille's description of Turner at work on <i>The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons</i> at the British Institution in 1835 (see No. 359). It has, however, been suggested that these works are more than just a random selection of late unfinished pictures. Lawrence Gowing, at the Turner Symposium held at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore in April 1975, suggested that Turner may have painted this series as a trial run to see if such ‘sketchy’ pictures were marketable. At the same symposium Jerrold Ziff suggested that, although towards the end of his life Turner appeared to become increasingly occupied with images of disaster, this group of oils, mainly of ‘elevated pastoral’ or ‘pastoral’ subjects, shows that Turner still felt that there was a place for the idyllic in the repertoire of a landscape painter and that he may have intended the group to stand as a reaffirmation of his faith in Nature in her more tranquil moods.</p>
<p>On the other hand, one cannot guarantee that Turner, in completing these unfinished works, might not have radically changed their mood; Frith's anecdote about Turner adding the dominant blue to <i>Undine giving the Ring to Massaniello</i> (see No. 424 [<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-undine-giving-the-ring-to-massaniello-fisherman-of-naples-n00549" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00549</span></a>]) shows how drastic Turner's alterations could be. Turner's last four exhibits in 1850 (Nos. 429–32 [<span>N00552</span>-<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-the-visit-to-the-tomb-n00555" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00555</span></a>]) could all have been painted over such a lay-in as <i>Sunrise, with a Boat between Headlands</i> (No. 516 [<span>N02002</span>]). Moreover, if this group of works is as late as has sometimes been argued (see below) one has to face the fact that Turner may have been at a loss for new compositions. Of the three works he exhibited between 1847 and 1849 inclusive, one was an early work left untouched, <i>Venus and Adonis</i> (No. 150), while the other two were also early works, reworked for the occasion, <i>The Hero of a Hundred Fights</i> (No. 427 [<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-the-hero-of-a-hundred-fights-n00551" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00551</span></a>]) and <i>The Wreck Buoy</i> (No. 428).</p>
<p>Turner's use of <i>Liber Studiorum</i> subjects has been associated with his revival of interest in that publication; in May and June 1845 he had McQueen's run off fifteen new sets (see John Pye and J. L. Roget, <i>Notes and Memoranda respecting the Liber Studiorum of J. M. W. Turner</i>, 1879, p. 71 n., and Gage 1980, p. 206). In addition, it has recently been discovered that the paintings from the series now in the Tate Gallery were painted on <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/c/canvas" title="Glossary definition for 'Canvas'"><span>canvases</span></a> supplied by the firm of T. Brown that bear stamps of a form that does not seem to have been used before about 1839 and also, in one case, a second stamp incorporating an element that gives the year in which the canvas was made: <i>Norham Castle, Sunrise</i>
(No. 512 [<span>N01981</span>]) bears an example of this second form of stamp implying the date 1844 (see Butlin, <i>loc. cit.</i>). This means that the dating to <i>c.</i> 1835–40 given in the first edition of this catalogue must be wrong and that the whole group must date from <i>c.</i> 1840 or later, with <i>Norham Castle, Sunrise</i> after 1844. In reviews of our first edition Luke Herrmann had already suggested that at least some of this group could date from the later 1840s or even to <i>c.</i> 1850 and Eric Shanes (1981) had suggested a dating of <i>c.</i> 1845, when McQueen reprinted the <i>Liber</i>; Andrew Wilton had also suggested that this group of oils ‘are products of Turner's last years’. More recently John Gage has also dated the group to <i>c.</i> 1845 (1983–4, <i>loc. cit.</i>), and Eric Shanes has gone further (1984), suggesting an actual order of completion beginning <i>c.</i> 1845 with the ‘initial delicacy and control’ of <i>Norham Castle</i> and <i>Inverary Pier</i> (Nos. 512 [<span>N01981</span>] and 519) and ending <i>c.</i> 1848, Turner's physical limitations having become acute, with ‘the somewhat rougher and clumsier handling’ of paintings such as <i>Sunrise, a Castle on a Bay</i> and <i>The Ponte delle Torri, Spoleto</i> (Nos. 515 [[<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-lucy-countess-of-carlisle-and-dorothy-percys-visit-to-their-father-lord-percy-when-n00515" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00515</span></a>] and 518 [<span>N02424</span>]). However, if one is correct in seeing these pictures as unfinished works it is probably going too far to derive dating arguments from their precise degree of finish and subtlety.</p>
<p>Although four of these works remained in Turner's collection and became part of the Turner Bequest the remaining seven were dispersed, either during his lifetime or relatively soon after his death. How they left Turner's studio is a mystery. Two of the series (Nos. 511 and 513) were sold at Christie's in 1865 from the collection of John Pound, the son by her first marriage of Mrs Booth, Turner's mistress and later housekeeper in his last years at Chelsea. Turner had presumably given these pictures either to her or to her son, or they had been left in his Chelsea studio at his death and been appropriated, but none of the other pictures in the series can be shown to have come from this source. There is a possibility that they were among the approximately eighty pictures that were rejected from the Turner Bequest by the National Gallery in 1856 on the grounds that they were not genuine, but against this suggestion must be weighed both the fact that these exclusions were made by Sir Charles Eastlake, a friend of Turner's who knew his work well, and also that a number of canvases that were still less ‘finished’ than those in this series were accepted for the Bequest. Nor can these works be identified in the Schedules of 1854 and 1856, which listed all the works in Turner's possession when he died, whether by him or not. They may have simply remained as a pile of unstretched canvases, perhaps rolled up together, and have been removed from Turner's studio; Stefan Slabczynski, former Keeper of Conservation at the Tate Gallery, who cleaned No. 509 for the Louvre, reported that it had formerly been rolled up as had others of the group (see Nos. 510 and 517). A letter written by Effie Ruskin to her mother on 24 August 1852, telling her that Ruskin had renounced the executorship of Turner's will as he was sickened by all the disputes over it, continued ‘... certain it is that already Turner's lawyer has stolen a bag of <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/d/drawing" title="Glossary definition for 'Drawing'"><span>drawings</span></a>’, which makes it sound as if the studio was open to pilfering of this kind. (Incidentally, had the late codicil to Turner's will that restricted the works that were to go to the nation to his ‘finished pictures’ not been set aside, none of this group, nor any other of Turner's unfinished pictures, would have formed part of the Turner Bequest.)</p>
<p><b>Lit.</b> Rothenstein and Butlin 1964, pp. 62–4; Gage 1975, pp. 454–6; Herrmann 1978, p. 773; Wilton 1979, pp. 224, 247; Butlin 1981, pp. 43–5; Shanes 1981, pp. 45–6; Gage in exh. cat., Paris 1983–4, pp. 149–51; Shanes 1984, pp. 284–8.</p>
<p></p>
<p><b>515. </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-sunrise-a-castle-on-a-bay-solitude-n01985" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N01985</span></a>]<b> Sunrise, a Castle on a Bay: ‘Solitude’</b> <i>c.</i> 1840–50</p>
<p>THE TATE GALLERY, LONDON (1985)</p>
<p>Canvas, 35 3/4 × 48 (91 × 122)</p>
<p><b>Coll.</b> Turner Bequest 1856; transferred to the Tate Gallery 1938.</p>
<p><b>Exh.</b> New York 1966 (27); R.A. 1974–5 (622); <i>European Landscape Painting</i>, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, September–October 1978 (49, repr.); Paris 1983–4 (78, repr.).</p>
<p><b>Lit.</b> Herrmann 1963, p. 38, colour pl. 17; Rothenstein and Butlin 1964, p. 50, colour pl. xx; Gowing 1966, p. 45; Butlin 1981, p. 45; Shanes 1984, p. 287.</p>
<p>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/c/composition" title="Glossary definition for 'Composition'"><span>composition</span></a> is one of those developed from the <i>Liber Studiorum</i>, in this case ‘Solitude’, R. 53, published 12 May 1814 (repr. Finberg 1924, p. 211; the preliminary pen and sepia drawing, CXVIII-A, and <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/e/etching" title="Glossary definition for 'Etching'"><span>etching</span></a> are repr. p. 210). The plate was one of those classified as ‘E.P.’, probably Epic, Elegant or Elevated Pastoral (see Finberg <i>op. cit.,</i> p. xxxviii). The plate is much more detailed and sharply defined, and includes a figure of the Magdalen reclining in meditation under the group of trees on the left; it seems to be included in a list of <i>Liber</i> subjects in the ‘Liber Notes (2)’ Sketchbook, CLIV (a)-26 <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/r/recto-verso" title="Glossary definition for 'Recto / Verso'"><span>verso</span></a>, under the heading ‘EP’, as ‘Says [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/e/engraving" title="Glossary definition for 'Engraving'"><span>engraver</span></a> of this plate, W. Say] Castle &amp; M<sup>n</sup> [Magdalen]’—the title is difficult to read.</p>
<p><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
2004-09-23T00:00:00
catalogue-entry
CATALOGUE_ENTRY
architecture bay castle cliff hill landscape military seascapes and coasts sunrise times of the day tree