Circa 1845
Oil on canvas

This dazzling morning view of Norham Castle is one of ten reworkings of earlier mezzotint images from the Liber Studiorum (in this case plate 57, published 1816). Turner had developed a long fascination with Norham, on the Scottish border, which he had first visited in 1797, nearly fifty years before painting this work. His most recent visit had taken place in 1831, when he was observed taking off his hat and making a low bow to the ruins. Asked by his travelling companion, the Edinburgh publisher Robert Cadell, what he meant by this gesture, he is supposed to have replied: ‘I made a drawing or painting of Norham several years since; it took, and from that day to this, I have had as much to do as my hands could execute’ (Thornbury 1862, I, pp.195–6).

In fact, he produced six finished watercolours of the castle, but these are spread out throughout his career, as if the motif embodies some underlying principle or keynote to which he enjoyed returning, seemingly a conflation of poetic and expressive possibility. Generally, he sought inspiration in the lines by James Thomson that he had selected for his 1798 exhibit (Private collection; W 225), but he also produced a sunset image for Cadell’s 1834–6 edition of Sir Walter Scott’s Prose Works (W 1099). He was, however, most especially attentive to the realisation of dawn light, casting the castle as a softened silhouette. The Royal Academy owns a late impression of the Liber image of Norham on which the paper has been scratched by Turner to add further highlights in the sky, and this clearly contributed to the development of this oil painting. The blue shadows and reflections are a remarkable observation, providing the main note of forceful colour beside the radiating yellow.

As in the other later Liber canvases, Turner has advanced his composition to the point at which a recognisable subject is apparent, but he then abandoned work on the generalised forms instead of modelling them to give detail and texture. Jack Lindsay detected a compelling tension between light and energy, and noted how the physical world trembles on the edge of becoming definite. Yet, why Turner took this and the other Liber paintings no further remains a matter for speculation. Clearly, these works, with their resemblance to ‘colour beginnings’, should be viewed as incomplete. For, had he exhibited them in his lifetime, their exquisite balance and nuances would have been effaced utterly.

It was only in 1906 that Norham Castle, Sunrise and the other pictures in the Turner Bequest that are part of the series were first shown, causing one critic to marvel: ‘We have never seen Turner before!’ Norham was instantly identified as an unknown masterpiece and attracted much attention from a patriotic press that wanted to claim Turner as a precursor of Impressionism. The Spectator captured this mood with its awestruck claim that ‘Turner in his latest development, more than any artist who had gone before him, painted not so much the objects he saw as the light which played around them’.