With the news that the National Heritage Memorial Fund has responded by agreeing to underwrite the appeal, The Blue Rigi will now find a permanent home at Tate Britain. Thank you very much to everyone who got involved and made this success possible.

In total The Art Fund has helped to secure over 50 works by Turner for museums and galleries in the UK: from Inverness to Plymouth, you are never far away from an ArtFunded Turner drawing, watercolour or oil painting.

In 2006 The Art Fund helped two regional museums acquire a Turner painting directly relevant to the locality. In May, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery acquired Hastings: Fish Market on the Sands, Early Morning, painted in 1824. This large watercolour depicts an early morning fish sale on Hastings beach, with the East Parade, Battery and Castle in the distance.

And in December, Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery secured Plymouth, from Mount Edgcumbe (1814). The scene shows a group of people dancing and waving at a fleet of ships anchored in Devonport Dockyard, capturing the victorious mood following the end of the Napoleonic Wars when the city had been threatened with invasion.

In its long history Art Fund members have helped put over 850,000 works of art into UK museums and galleries, including other works by Turner listed below. If you want to find out about how you can get more involved in saving other great works please see our benefits of membership.

Swiss and French subjects

Constance
1842, watercolour and bodycolour with pen and ink over pencil on paper
York Art Gallery
ArtFunded 1985

Turner first visited Switzerland in 1802 and returned there often, especially towards the end of his career. This luminous view of Lake Constance was produced at the same time as the Rigi series. It is one of ten finished watercolours of Swiss subjects taken from drawings executed on Turner’s Continental tour in 1841, and one of only eight finished late Swiss sheets currently in British public collections.

Before making the watercolours, Turner presented ‘sample’ compositions to patrons. Constance was commissioned by Ruskin, Turner’s greatest champion, from such a ‘sample’ study. It is a beautiful example of the artist’s late work in watercolour.

Valley of Chamonix, France, Mont Blanc in the Distance
1809, watercolour
Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
Bequeathed through The Art Fund by EE Cook in 1955

This scene is based on a sheet from the St Gothard and Mont Blanc sketchbook in the Turner Bequest and is unusually it is signed in full. It was produced for Walter Fawkes, Turner’s principal patron during his early career, who was particularly fond of the artist’s Alpine subjects. Most of the finished watercolours worked up from these sketches were painted for him.

Other views

Ullswater, Cumberland
c 1835, pencil and watercolour
Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum, Grasmere
ArtFunded 2005

Before it was acquired by Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum in 2005, this was the last picture of the Lake District by Turner to remain in private hands. It was probably painted soon before being engraved in one of the later parts of Picturesque Views in England and Wales by JT Wilmore (1835), but it is based on studies going back to 1797, when Turner first visited the Lake District.

In Pre-Raphaelitism (1851) Ruskin writes that Turner ‘could not at that time [1797] render the sunset colours: he went back to it, therefore, in the English series, and painted it again with his new power. The same hills are there, the same shadows, the same cows, the same boat, the same rocks, only the copse is cut away – it interfered with the masses of his colour. Some figures are introduced bathing; and what was grey and feeble gold in the first drawing, became purple and burning rose-colour in the last.’

Dolbadarn Castle
c 1799, oil on panel
National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth
ArtFunded 1998

Dolbadarn Castle is the preliminary study for one of Turner’s first major oil paintings, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1800 and presented as his Diploma Work when he was elected an Academician in 1802. It was based on sketches he made at the castle in 1798.

This rugged, dramatic scene features the captive Welsh prince Owain Goch (Owain the Red), who was imprisoned at Dolbadarn from 1255 to 1277 by his brother and rival Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, a champion of Welsh independence.

When the finished canvas was exhibited at the RA in 1800, Turner added to it lines of verse which he is presumed to have written himself. This was the first occasion on which he used poetry in this way, though it later became fairly common practice with him.

The Loss of an East Indiaman
c 1818, watercolour on paper
Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford
ArtFunded 1997

This unconventional watercolour was evidently done by Turner as a pendant to his better-known A First Rate Taking in Stores, also in the collection of the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery.

The Loss of an East Indiaman depicts the shipwreck of the Halsewell, which sank off Seacombe, Dorset, on 6 January 1786, with the loss of around 170 lives; the harrowing accounts of the few survivors captured the public imagination for decades.

Turner visited the site of the tragedy, referring to it in verse in his Devonshire Coast Number I sketchbook (1811–13). Here, the ship is depicted at the moment when the broken vessel’s crowded deck is about to be overwhelmed by a huge wave, sending scores of people to their doom in the tempestuous sea.

Give a Donation