JMW Turner - Norham Castle on Tweed, Sunrise (1798)

JMW Turner (23 April 1775 - 19 December 1851) Norham Castle on Tweed, Sunrise, 1798, © Trustees of the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, (The Higgins Bedford)

For JMW Turner's 246th birthday, I thought I would show you Norham Castle on the Tweed, Sunrise, painted by Turner in 1798. It is one of the highlights in our weather exhibition, Under the Same Sky. I don’t know when you will get to see it in the flesh, but along with the rest of The Higgins Bedford collection, it will be waiting for you when we reopen.

The exhibition is in two parts, one gallery is devoted to the local impact of weather and the other has artist’s depictions of the sky, drawn from The Cecil Higgins Art Gallery collection.

The art gallery began to collect Turner’s watercolours in the 1950s. We now have nine works by him in Bedford, each covering an area of his output and life. When I first started learning about Turner, it was his oils, not his watercolours that I saw first. One of my Dad’s favourite paintings was The Fighting Temeraire in The National Gallery’s Collection. I don’t know what it was in particular that he liked about it, but I like to think it might be the same as me, not the ship being towed, but the coppery sunset that fills the right hand side of the painting.

When I started working with the Cecil Higgins paintings, I learnt about Turner’s watercolours and his legacy of turning watercolour from a simple tool used for topographical depictions and into an expressive and versatile medium, both equal to oil painting. Norham Castle in Bedford’s collection is an early example of this. In 1798 when it was exhibited at The Royal Academy, along with other northern subjects, it was described as having ‘the force and harmony of an oil painting’.

It is again, the sun that I am drawn to in Norham Castle. When Turner first exhibited the watercolour at the Royal Academy, he included in the catalogue five lines by the poet James Thomson (1700–1748):

But Yonder comes the powerful King of Day,

Rejoicing in the East. The lessening cloud.

The Kindling azure, and the mountain’s brow

Illumin’d with fluid gold — his near approach.

Betoken glad.

Thomson was born only a few miles from Norham, so would surely have seen the same scene Turner had risen early from his lodgings to witness, the mountains ‘illimin’d with fluid gold’. In the Tate’s collection there are studies which show how Turner experimented to get this brilliant effect of advancing light.

Bedford’s watercolour is from preparatory studies Turner made on his first trip to Norham Castle in 1797, as part of a tour of the North of England. The castle was to become a lifelong fascination that culminated in the blazing light of Norham Castle, Sunrise, 1845, again in the Tate’s collection. 

In 1831, Turner passed Norham again and was said to have taken off his hat and made a low bow to the castle. When asked what he was doing he said, “I made a drawing or painting of Norham several years since. It took; and from that day to this I have had as much to do as my hands could execute”. The painting Turner is referring to, is most likely to be Bedford’s watercolour, or is it? In fact there are two identical versions of Norham Castle. We think that the first one Turner painted is, in fact, in a private collection and that was the one that was exhibited at The Royal Academy in 1798. It was seen by an early patron of Turner, Edward Lascelles of Harewood House, who asked him to repeat the scene again resulting in Bedford’s work. Whichever version Bedford’s is, it is a truly remarkable work which hopefully you will be able to enjoy very soon.

Please keep an eye on The Higgins Bedford website for updates on a reopening date at www.thehigginsbedford.org.uk

Written by Victoria Partridge, Keeper of Fine and Decorative Art