Exhibitions
The Vaughan Bequest of Turners Scottish National Gallery 1st-31st January 2020
Almost the first thing I did on moving house some years ago was to have UV filters put on the three large windows of my new sitting room.
They face south-south-east and, in summer, sunlight can flood the room. As most of my pictures are in watercolour, without the UV film I would have little on my walls. Direct light of any sort (and especially sun), overheating and damp can all damage paper as well as destroy pigments.
The philanthropic collector Henry Vaughan (1809-99) was fully aware of the dangers. When he left 38 Turner watercolours to the National Galleries of Scotland (others went to Dublin), he stipulated that they were ‘to be exhibited to the public all at one time, free of charge, in the month of January’. For the rest of the year, they were to be kept in a
special cabinet in the print room, where they can be seen by appointment.
In January, the levels of natural light are at their lowest, and Vaughan’s wishes have been respected. It is a great treat to be able to see so many Turners together in fine condition.
At 21, Vaughan inherited a fortune from his father, a hatter, and he was encouraged in his collecting by Ruskin. He gave Constable’s Hay Wain to the National Gallery in London; Michelangelo, Raphael, Rubens and Rembrandt drawings to the British Museum; stained glass and more Turners to the V & A. Since he had no heirs, at his death the remaining collections were left to institutions around the country.
The Edinburgh bequest covers almost all of Turner’s career, from early topographical drawings in blue and grey washes from the 1790s to fully finished works of the 1830s and 1840s. Turner first visited Scotland in 1801 and the Continent in the following year, during the brief Peace of Amiens. His last Scottish tour was in 1831 and his last foreign trip, to the French coast, in 1845.
Other Scottish visits were in 1822, when he hoped for royal commissions arising from George IV’S state visit, or connected with illustrations to the works of Walter Scott. Two of the Scott vignettes are in the Vaughan Bequest, and others illustrating Byron, Rogers and Campbell are in the Gallery’s collection. Among the highlights are a wonderfully atmospheric Venice from the Lagoon, dating from 1840, in which, as in The Fighting Temeraire, he contrasts the past and the future through sail and steam, and a sun-filled Heidelberg of about 1846. That is rightly considered to be one of his finest late works on paper. An intense little Sea View of 1826 shows just how powerful unfaded watercolour can be.
Hats off to Henry Vaughan.