Turner turns heads at the University of Toronto Art Centre

It was out for only a little more than an hour, but what an impression it made.

As a tribute to J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free, the acclaimed exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the University of Toronto Art Centre put its own painting by the famous English artist on temporary display on Nov. 12.

Pembroke Castle: Clearing Up of a Thunderstorm has been part of the U of T collection since 1932, when Mrs. Augustine FitzGerald of London, England made a gift of it in memory of both her late husband and her father-in-law, William FitzGerald, who had been Third Head Boy at Upper Canada College in the 1830s.

How high does the evocative scene of the Welsh castle – already a tourist attraction when Turner saw it – rank among U of T holdings?

“Certainly one of the top 10, and probably in the top five,” according to Lloyd DeWitt, AGO curator of European art.

Sarah Robayo Sheridan, curator of the federated Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and University of Toronto Art Centre, concurred, noting the unusual scale of the watercolour, which is more than a metre wide.

“Watercolours were usually much smaller and the domain of amateurs,” she commented. “This brings the medium to a new level.”

The identification plaque on the gilded frame ascribes the painting to 1801 and the Royal Academy. Contemporary scholars think the true year of composition was 1806.

DeWitt speculated that the sunlight breaking through the post-thunderstorm clouds is not only a signature Turner imagistic touch but an expression of “positive renewal after conflict.” British fortunes in the struggle with Napoleon were turning, the Battle of Trafalgar having galvanized the nation the year before.

(Joseph Mallord William Turner's Pembroke Castle: Clearing Up of a Thunderstorm, 1806, watercolour. 
67.3 x 101.1 x 0 cm. Gift of Mrs Augustine FitzGerald in 1932 in memory of her husband Augustine Fitzgerald and especially her husband’s father, Mr. William FitzGerald.)

Of special note are the fine rendering of turbulent waters separating the beach and the castle. This waterway, Robayo Sheridan noted, is in reality narrower and much calmer. “This is an important example of artistic license,” she said.

DeWitt is impressed by Turner’s integration of storytelling elements – two villagers are scouring for fish and flotsam in the foreground – with the broad sweep of nature.

“He’s combining genres here to create a more intense experience,” DeWitt said. Turner’s inner genius was abetted by the fact that he was competing with romantic landscape painters whose work helped popularize the vistas of Great Britain.

Pembroke Castle: Clearing Up of a Thunderstorm is too early to be included in the AGO show, which focuses on the last 15 years of the artist’s life. But the masterful watercolour has made the rounds. The work has been seen at the AGO, the Yale Center for British Art, the British Museum and, most recently, in the 2014 exhibition Turner and the Sea at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.

It was part of the inaugural exhibition of the University of Toronto Art Centre in 1996. But the watercolour is too delicate to be put on permanent display. “We have to be judicious about when we show it,” Robayo Sheridan said.

The painting is available to scholars. This is a vital resource, as Turner’s art is notoriously difficult to capture fully in reproductions.

Neither DeWitt nor Robayo Sheridan was inclined to estimate the market value of the painting. DeWitt noted that the The Blue Rigi, a later but also smaller Turner watercolour, was kept in England through a public appeal in 2007. This painting had been sold at auction the previous year for 5.8 million British pounds.