Staffa, Fingal’s Cave

Turner showed this canvas at the Royal Academy in 1832, and the museum records that it then remained with the artist in his studio until 1845, when his friend the painter Charles Robert Leslie bought it on behalf of the New York collector James Lenox. It passed from the Lenox Library through a New York auction in 1956 and the collection of Gavin Astor, second Baron Astor of Hever, before Thomas Gibson Fine Art sold it to Paul Mellon in 1978; he gave it to the Yale Center for British Art that December. The painting is signed at the lower right, “J.M.W. Turner RA.” Its subject is Staffa, the Hebridean island off Scotland’s west coast whose basalt geology and long association with the mythic Gaelic hero Fingal made it a destination for Romantic travellers, and the museum observes that Turner’s ambitions here reached well beyond topography.