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 colouor, 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 the Liber Studiorum (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 series 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.

To establish the compositions, he made brown watercolour drawings, then etched outlines onto copper plates. In a few instances, as here, Turner also developed the tone, using aquatint and mezzotint to describe 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, and the "M" in the upper margin indicates Turner's category of Marine landscape. Inverary Pier is no. 35 in the "Liber Studiorum' series.

Te Papa's impression is the third state of six. Evidently the differences between the states are often so minimal that they hardly constitute separate states. The collection also has Turner's 'first' etching of the same scene, which is far more schematic (1969-0020-17).

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