Every January 1 since 1901, small crowds have gathered outside the national galleries in Dublin and Edinburgh. For just one month, precious watercolor paintings by the English Romantic artist J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) are on view, gifts to both institutions from one of Victorian Britain’s greatest art collectors, Henry Vaughan.
Born in 1809, Vaughan became rich in 1828, when his father, a hat manufacturer, died. He used the sizable inheritance to fill his grand London house with paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Constable. Turner, however, was his favorite artist.
The men probably met in the 1840s, when Vaughan was in his 30s. Turner was around 70 and a polarizing figure. To capture nature at its most dramatic and sublime, he had begun using a dry brush, knife, or fingertip to agitate his paint into wildly expressive images that dissolved detail into atmosphere. Teetering on the brink of abstraction, these works would pave the way for Impressionism, and eventually Mark Rothko. “This man Turner,” the American painter joked in 1966, “he learnt a lot from me.”
Vaughan took a special interest in Turner’s watercolors. Portable, quick, and fluid, the medium was a natural fit for the artist’s radical path. He used it throughout his career for large and impressive exhibition pictures, for highly detailed images intended to be engraved and published as prints, and for plein air color experiments that analyzed sunlit mountaintops and storm-battered beaches across the Continent.
When Vaughan died, in 1899, he left 31 of his watercolors to Dublin and 38 to Edinburgh. He also left rules. Each collection had to be shown annually, for free, and only during January, when gray skies and short days meant light would be at its weakest and therefore least damaging to the art.
Vaughan appears to have carefully managed his bequest so that every aspect of Turner’s watercolor oeuvre is represented in both portions. Anne Hodge, the curator of prints and drawings at the National Gallery of Ireland, explains: “We have works from when the artist was in his teens—conventional but very beautiful topographical landscapes that show how precocious he was—to incredibly abstract images from the 1840s, which have a great sense of energy and wouldn’t look out of place if they were made today.”
Last year, to mark 250 years since Turner’s birth, the museums traded collections for the first time. The group that Scotland received contained the artist’s only view of its capital, Edinburgh from Below Arthur’s Seat, which Vaughan amusingly gave to Dublin. In return, Dubliners were treated to The Piazzetta, Venice, a late work depicting a summer storm over La Serenissima in washes of blues, oranges, and pinks. As a final flourish, Turner used his thumbnail—reportedly grown into a claw for such purposes—to scratch away at the paper’s surface, revealing a streak of white lightning through the sky.
“The Vaughan Bequest has become a bit of a pilgrimage,” says Hodge, “to see Turner’s awe and wonder at the beauties of nature, during the horribly gloomy month of January.”
“We often get feedback that visitors feel uplifted by returning to see the brilliant color and light of these paintings,” agrees Charlotte Topsfield, senior curator of British drawings and prints at the National Galleries of Scotland. “For the rest of the year, they’re kept in a special cabinet. But everyone is very welcome to make an appointment to come and look at them.”
“Turner as Inspiration” is on at the National Gallery of Ireland, in Dublin, until January 31. “Turner in January” is on at the National Galleries of Scotland: National, in Edinburgh, until January 31
Harry Seymour is a London-based art historian and writer
