Art reviews: Turner in January: Ireland’s Vaughan Bequest |The 144th Open Annual Exhibition of the RSW


Turner in January: Ireland’s Vaughan Bequest, National Gallery of Scotland Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh ★★★★★
144th Exhibition of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh ★★★★
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Hide AdThe Turners in January: they come round like the snowdrops, a beautiful promise for the new year’s beginning. This year however, there is a change. Instead of the 39 watercolours bequeathed by Henry Vaughan to the National Gallery of Scotland in 1900, we have the 31 that he bequeathed at the same time to the National Gallery of Ireland, while, reciprocally, our watercolours are being shown in Dublin. There too Vaughan’s stipulation was that these precious pictures could only be shown in January. Watercolour is fugitive and in January the light is lowest, while his stipulation also limits exposure to a single month.
Vaughan, a childless man of means, amassed a vast collection which he distributed variously in gifts and bequests. Constable’s Haywain was given by him to the National Gallery in London, for instance. Among much else he also had 100 Turner watercolours. Twenty went to the British Museum and the balance was split between Edinburgh and Dublin. Although Scotland got a few more, the two collections are pretty well matched. Both cover most of Turner’s career and include some real masterpieces.
Vaughan knew Turner and started collecting in the artist’s lifetime. Consistently, however, he favoured the informal, spontaneous, sometimes even incomplete, over more finished works. There are, for instance, freely executed pictures here that Turner did as proposals for more saleable, finished works. Consequently you often feel you are beside him as, deftly and rapidly, he works on the spot. I am sure it is because of this sense of intimacy that we look forward so much each year to seeing them. It is a real encounter and in this the Irish pictures do not disappoint.
The freedom that marks so many pictures here did not come to Turner all at once. Early works like The West Gate, Canterbury, done before he was twenty is precisely executed, although there is already something really lively about his engagement with the scene. Two or three years later, he painted a portrait of a magnificent beech tree while a picture of a sluice gate catching the light against a background of shady trees from much the same date is particularly lovely.
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Hide AdA stormy view of Edinburgh (Vaughan maybe thought that Edinburgh didn’t need a picture of itself) from 1801 is already atmospheric in a way that was to become typical, just as we see it in a painting of a ship in a storm, painted a dozen years later. Although he plays warm against cool to create this drama, the picture, like all these earlier works, is still limited in colour. Later the range of available colours expanded dramatically. When it did, no one was better equipped than Turner to exploit it as, for instance, in a painting from the 1820s of fishing boats on Folkestone Beach, a symphony in scarlet, blue and gold. Here we see too how even when recording such drama, Turner could effortlessly also note details of the people and their fishing boats, all apparently without any break in rhythm. In the same way, a drawing of ships is at once vivid and intricately observed.


There is, however, very little detail in one of the most stunning pictures here. Clearly painted rapidly and on the spot, it records a fiery sunset over Petworth Park. A lake in the foreground reflects the setting sun and scarlet clouds while the middle ground is already dark with shadow. Here we really are beside Turner as, working quickly, he responds to the drama of nature. It is quite thrilling. You can imagine Henry Vaughan’s excitement when he acquired it and it makes us grateful for his good taste.
Like the Edinburgh collection, Dublin holds a fine group of Turner’s dramatic views in Switzerland and the Alps. There are several wonderful pantings here of the Val d’Aosta, for instance, giving us a sense of the scale and drama of the mountains, all in the compass of a small sheet of paper. One of the finest pictures here however is of Ostend. He must have passed through the port on a journey into Europe and stopped there to paint a tall lighthouse and a windmill silhouetted against the setting sun while the sea reflects the blazing sky.
But it was Venice that inspired him most in his visionary last years. In one Venetian picture here the great Campanile of St Mark’s hovers ghostlike against a dark cloud as a storm breaks over the lagoon. In another, a confusion of people and gondolas crowd the quays of the Piazetta beneath the Doge’s Palace, while the white dome of the Salute hovers like a vision in the distance. Perhaps among them all, however, we see the most essential Turner in a vision in hazy vermillion of the island of San Pietro di Castello floating in the mists of sunrise.
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Hide AdThese watercolours set a pretty high standard for the RSW, the Royal Scottish Society for Painters in Watercolour, showing in the adjacent galleries. The society’s dedication to the medium has been a little eroded, however. It now accepts work in any water based medium. This really means acrylic, but acrylic can look exactly like oil paint and there are works here with a heavy texture that are a long way from watercolour.
Among more than 200 works by the society’s members and selected from an open application there are, however, many that do rejoice in the unique qualities of the medium and the paper that is its traditional support.
Hugh Buchanan, a long-established master, demonstrates its unique luminosity in a big painting of a chair in a sunlit window, all in a dizzy perspective. Ann Ross is another long established watercolour artist whose work is always a delight. Boboli, Firenze and In an Italian Garden, both collaged watercolour, do not disappoint.


Claire Harkness’s lovely small painting of a blackbird and a magnolia flower has above it a passage of Chinese calligraphy in homage to the oriental masters of the medium. The details of nature recorded by both Sheila Anderson-Hardy and Darren Woodhead also demonstrate the affinity of the medium with nature’s delicacy.
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Hide AdAnn Oram’s big still-lifes of flowers are more baroque, but watercolour can be precise without losing liveliness. Angus McEwan’s painting of some rusty hinges and Bramble by Fiona Strickland are beautiful examples of this. Much of the latter picture is white paper and in watercolour, paper, the support, always matters.
Susan Macintosh’s atmospheric painting of Assynt is another example of this. It hangs unframed so we really feel the physical quality of the support and, as the society’s president Anthea Gage demonstrates with two big, dramatic paintings of turbulent seas, watercolour needn’t be all daintiness. Turner would agree.
Turner in January until 31 January; RSW Annual Exhibition until 5 February
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