The Blue Rigi, Sunrise
Tate, London
Norham Castle, Sunrise, J. M. W. Turner, c. 1845. Oil on canvas, 90.8 × 121.9 cm. Tate, London. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Tate, London replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Romanticism
Norham Castle, Sunrise
J. M. W. Turner · c. 1845
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 90.8 × 121.9 cm
- Held by
- Tate, London
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Romanticism
- Country
- United Kingdom
The painter
J. M. W. Turner
Turner was a barber's son from Covent Garden who entered the Royal Academy schools at fourteen, exhibited there at fifteen, and became a full Academician at twenty-six — about as fast as the English art establishment has ever moved. For the first half of his career he competed openly with the dead: specifically with Claude Lorrain, whose golden harbour scenes he set out to equal and then to surpass, and he left paintings to the nation on the condition that they hang beside Claudes so the comparison could be made. The second half is the one that matters to later painting.
Nearby
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What to look at
Turner had been drawing Norham Castle on the Tweed since he was a young man, and by the 1840s he had arrived at this: a blue wedge where the castle is, a yellow-white blaze where the sun is, a blue-grey smear that is a cow standing in the river, and essentially nothing else. The paint is thin and the canvas weave shows through in the sky. It was never exhibited in his lifetime and was found in his studio after his death, which is why it is usually described as unfinished — and why that description is contested. It is possible that he had simply stopped needing the castle to look like a castle. Whatever the intention, the picture is where people reach for when they want to argue that Turner anticipated abstraction, and it is the single most reproduced "late Turner" for exactly that reason.