Staffa, Fingal's Cave

In the summer of 1831 Turner was touring Scotland for illustrations to Walter Scott's poems, and he took a small paddle-steamer out to Staffa, a bare island in the Hebrides famous for its sea cave. A storm came up. He later remembered the sun near the horizon bursting through the rain cloud, angry, and that is more or less what he painted, the low burning light and the dark weather closing in. The steamer is there too, a smudge of smoke on the water, a very new machine set against very old rock. Years later this became the first oil by Turner to cross the Atlantic. The New York collector James Lenox bought it unseen in 1845 and complained that it looked indistinct, to which Turner answered that indistinctness was his forte.