Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne, morning.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), usually known as J.M.W. Turner, was a leading English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist, known for his expressive use of colour, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings.

Intensely private, eccentric and reclusive, Turner was a controversial figure throughout his career. He left behind over 2,000 paintings and 19,000 drawings and sketches. He had been championed by the leading English art critic John Ruskin from 1840, and is today regarded as having elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Although he wasn't an impressionist, having preceded that movement by two generations, he was much admired by its practitioners, and alongside his contemporary and rival John Constable, enjoys a near legendary status in British art.

Turner distilled his ideas about landscape in <em>Liber Studiorum</em> (Latin for "Book of Studies"), a series of seventy prints plus a frontispiece (originally he intended it to have 100 prints), published in fourteen parts between 1807 and 1819. The <em>Liber Studiorum</em> illustrated Turner's arguments for the supremacy of landscape painting. It contained no written text; instead it was made up of individual mezzotint prints on paper. The prints reflected the five categories of landscape painting that Turner believed existed: architectural, historical, marine, mountainous and pastoral. He wrote an initial on each work to indicate to which category it belonged, in this instance 'marine'.

To establish the compositions, Turner made brown watercolour drawings, then etched outlines onto copper plates. This impression has been described by Turner experts as the 'first etching'; it was before he added aquatint or mezzotint - the latter can be seen in another Te Papa print of the same theme (1969-20-18). The result here looks fresh and spontaneous, perhaps more pleasing to modernist tastes than the much more highly finished and refined etching/mezzotint.

Here Turner depicts a Scottish loch bordered by mountains with the foreground enlivened by boats and fishermen near a pier, a floating buoy, and the fluke of a submerged anchor piercing the water. Despite the engraved title, the image does not represent Loch Fyne, but the smaller adjacent Loch Shira. <em>Inverary Pier</em> is no. 35 in the <em>Liber Studiorum</em> series.

See:

Liverpool Museums, 'Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne, Morning', http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/collections/works-on-paper/item-240669.aspx

Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/382938

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   June 2018