Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne: Morning

This unfinished painting belongs to the last phase of J. M.W. Turner’s career, an experimental period where he reworked earlier compositions in the process of exploring new approaches to color. The landscape is derived from a mezzotint of Loch Fyne in the Scottish Highlands, which Turner had published thirty years earlier in his Liber Studiorum (1809–11), a set of prints cataloguing his landscapes. Inverary Pier is one of a number of paintings of the early 1840s that developed themes from the Liber Studiorum but which never left his notoriously slovenly studio. All of them are unfinished and share affinities with Turner’s late watercolors. Often, as here, they challenged conventional ways of composing pictures by pushing warm colors into the middle grounds and even backgrounds, thereby rejecting traditional aerial perspective. This picture was probably removed from Turner’s studio and sold after his death by his mistress, Sophia Booth.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2022