Sunrise after a squally night

It was a revelation, in 2014, watching then NGV Senior Conservator of Painting John Payne carefully remove discoloured varnish and grime from the surface of J. M. W. Turner’s early masterpiece, Dunstanburgh Castle, north-east coast of Northumberland, sunrise after a squally night, 1798. Suddenly, at the centre of the painting, tiny figures of fishermen could be seen wrestling with a boat at the edge of a rock-strewn inlet. To the far right, minute specks of coloured paint hinted at other figures gathered at the water’s edge on the coast beneath the imposing ruins of the medieval castle of Dunstanburgh (or Dunstanborough), that has stood sentinel on the north-east coast of England since the fourteenth century. These humanising touches play a vital role in Turner’s dramatic depiction of the castle’s sunlit gatehouse and towers, which rise majestically above the besieging forces of wind and sea. They provide a sense of scale to Turner’s composition, their diminutive presence enhancing the sublime and awesome effect of Dunstanburgh’s ancient, monumental ruins.

The reclaiming of these miniscule actors in Turner’s epic conception of Dunstanburgh enabled us to see this painting clearly for the first time in generations. Arguably, it takes us back to the way in which the painting appeared when the young twenty-three-year-old Turner first exhibited it at London’s Royal Academy in 1798. From there, the painting had several private owners before being acquired at auction in 1874 by Hugh Grosvenor, the first Duke of Westminster, for ‘a sum which is one of the very highest yet paid for a Turner picture’, as noted at the time.¹ Anon, ‘Sale of the Holmewood Collection’, Birmingham Daily Post, 28 April 1874, p. 6.

Fourteen years later, in 1888, the duke loaned Dunstanburgh Castle, along with two other Turner paintings, Conway Castle and The Mouth of the Thames, to the Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition. It seems that by then, Dunstanburgh Castle may have already become obscured by darkened varnish and dirt. The official catalogue accompanying the exhibition contained a rather extraordinary annotation in the entries for the duke’s Turner loans, to the effect that ‘they have suffered from want of cleaning; but a skilful expert could restore them to their pristine brilliancy’.² Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne & Joshua Lake (ed.), Official Guide to the Picture Galleries, and Catalogue of Fine Arts, M. L. Hutchinson, Melbourne, 1889, p. 10.

This was queried by a reporter for the Adelaide Observer, who argued:

We have heard lately that Turner’s colours are fading, but it is difficult to believe that any such process has taken place in these. They have no strong colour, but the subjects do not admit of it, and harmony of general effect is there. The suggestion in the catalogue that a skilful expert should be engaged to make them brighter, is enough to make the Duke of Westminster, who lent them, gnash his teeth.

It seems clear, though, that this reporter was not seeing as pristine a painting as he thought. This is evident from his notation that ‘in the foreground’ of Dunstanburgh Castle ‘and completely in the shadow of the hill is a river’. This is in fact the wave-lashed rocky cove now clearly discernible in the painting, above which the sailors struggle with their boat. A reference to the fact that ‘there are some figures’ in the Duke’s Conway Castle painting ‘which are about as bad as Turner’s figures usually are’, further indicates that no figures were to be seen in Dunstanburgh Castle at this time.³ Anon, ‘In the Art Galleries of the Melbourne Exhibition’, Adelaide Observer, 20 October 1888, p. 41.

At the close of 1888, the Duke officially presented Dunstanburgh Castle as a gift to the NGV Collection. After the closure of the Centennial International Exhibition in 1889, the painting was transferred to the Gallery’s premises within the State Library Victoria building on Swanston Street, where ‘requiring a stronger light’ it was positioned ‘to benefit by the post meridian sunlight’.⁴ Anon, ‘The Melbourne Picture Gallery’, The Leader (Melbourne), 9 November 1889, p. 28. In April 1889, a commentator in The Age noted how the painting was:

…at last hung in a light in which it can be seen. The significance and natural rendering of the noble roll of waves can now be appreciated, and some of the details introduced to break up the monotony of the middle distance may be made out on close inspection.

It was still lamented, however, that ‘it is a thousand pities that the thick coat of dirty varnish with which the canvas is overladen cannot be removed. Should this be successfully accomplished the picture would probably appear much in the state in which it left the painter’s hands nearly 100 years ago.’⁵ Anon, ‘The National Gallery’, The Age, 6 April 1889, p. 15.

In 1906 the painting was apparently still in a very grubby condition, prompting an ‘admirer’ to write to the Argus newspaper proposing ‘Would it not be advisable if the trustees of the National Gallery had this picture cleaned, as it is now in a deplorable state, and the subject barely discernible? A friend of mine, who saw the picture before it left England, tells me it was very much brighter than it is now, and the cause is simply the accumulation of dust and dirt’.⁶ Admirer, ‘Dust-Covered Picture’, The Argus (Melbourne), 7 Dec. 1906, p. 11. Accordingly, Dunstanburgh Castle was to be one of ten paintings that were cleaned and treated by F. W. Colley, an English artist and picture restorer based in Wellington, New Zealand, during his visit to Melbourne in 1929. It was subsequently reported that ‘the pictures treated by Mr Colley had certainly been improved, but that time alone could tell whether the improvement would endure’.⁷ Edmund La Touche Armstrong & Robert Douglass Boys, The Book of the Public Library, Museums, and National Gallery of Victoria 1906–1931, Fraser & Jenkinson, Melbourne, 1932, p. 85.

The clarity of the painting after F. W. Colley’s restoration, and across subsequent decades, has not been recorded. By the 1980s, however, the Dunstanburgh Castle was once again being described as visually compromised. The great Turner scholar, Evelyn Joll, wrote mournfully in 1988 that ‘Although I have never seen it, it is clearly very dirty and is unusual in having no human figures, or none that are discernible’.⁸ Evelyn Joll, ‘Turner at Dunstanborough 1797–1834’, Turner Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, Winter 1988, p. 4. But thanks to the meticulous 2014 conservation efforts of Payne, Dunstanburgh Castle can once again be enjoyed in all its glorious detail. Quiet moments spent before this majestic painting still inspire thoughts of one’s minute place in the world, when confronted by its compelling vision of nature’s eternal power.

Dr Ted Gott is NGV Senior Curator, International Art.

The NGV warmly thanks the Duke of Westminster, 1888, for gifting this work to the Collection.

This article first appeared in NGV Magazine, March–April 2025

To read about the framing of this Turner masterpiece, see A Tale of a Frame by Holly McGowan-Jackson

Notes