Storms, Steamers, Staffa: Fingal’s Cave in the Eyes of J. M. W. Turner
By Kasia Middleton
You can almost hear the great black waves booming against the cliffs. The water and the sky are dramatic, but there is no seething anger. Instead, the heights of the cliffs, the burning orange hole of the sun, and the towering clouds all exhibit a cool, imperious majesty. But there, amongst all these monuments of nature, sits a defiant, manmade steamer. Barely visible against the sky, it still insists on chuffing out its own small cloud to rival those which surround it. Captured by the champion of the debate between nature and industrialism in nineteenth-century art, this scene constitutes the 1832 painting Staffa, Fingal’s Cave, by J. M. W. Turner [Fig. 1].
Figure 1, J. M. W. Turner, Staffa, Fingal's Cave, c.1831-2. Oil on canvas, 90.8 cm x 121.3 cm. Yale Center for British Art. Image courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art.
Staffa is an uninhabited island in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides which remains a popular tourist destination to this day, but the real boom in its touristic industry took place during the heyday of English Romanticism. It was purportedly discovered by Sir Joseph Banks in the late eighteenth century. Shortly after the “discovery”, in 1772, he published an account of the site and its topography which strongly implied little was known about Staffa before his discovery of it, despite it being implausible that local Scottish islanders were ignorant of its existence. Nonetheless, Banks was careful to put forth an exclusive narrative of English discovery.
The island was remarkable thanks to the existence of Fingal’s Cave, whose walls are made from columnar basalt formed in the volcanic crucible of Earth’s early days. This was of particular fascination to the Vulcanists, a late eighteenth-century group who (correctly) believed the Earth’s rocks to have been formed during volcanic processes. There was intense debate between this group and their opposition, the Neptunists, who believed rocks derived from the crystallisation of water. Fingal’s Cave became a locus for science, a home for those who sought more than the story of God’s creation of the Earth. In Scott’s fourth canto of The Lord of the Isles (1815), the poet writes of the cave:
“Where, as to shame the temples deck’d / By skill of earthly architect, / Nature herself, it seem’d would raise / A Minster to her Maker’s praise! / […] From the high vault an answer draws, / in varied tone prolong’d and high, / that mocks the organ’s melody.”
Banks himself wrote of the cave: “Compared to this, what are the cathedrals or palaces built by men!” It was a place to rival religious faith, to demonstrate the great, incomprehensible beauty of nature. This was encompassed in the Romanticist pursuit of the Sublime, a concept first outlined by Edmund Burke in 1757 and defined as the sense of insignificance one feels in the presence of the greatness of nature. It was this tantalising mixture of fear and excitement which spurred on Victorian visits to Staffa, including by the Queen herself in 1847.
Scholars have pointed to the “inescapable sociality of space” in this period and the way that sites such as Fingal’s Cave offered an untouched, uninhabited realm to escape this restrictive social model and explore the basics of human nature. The cave, as was to be expected in the Romanticist environment of nineteenth-century Britain, soon became associated with myth, earning its name from Ossian’s legendary poems as the home of the mythic hero Fingal. It can come as no surprise that a place so forceful in nature was associated with a figure who himself blurred the boundaries between nature and humanity: “I beheld their chief […] tall as a glittering rock. His spear is a blasted pine. His shield the rising moon!”
Figure 2, J. M. W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839. Oil on canvas, 90.7 cm x 121.6 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo courtesy of The National Gallery, London.
Figure 3, J. M. W. Turner, Rain Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway, 1844. Oil on canvas, 91 cm x 121.8 cm. National Gallery, London. Image courtesy of The National Gallery, London.
This is the environment from which the unmistakeably Turner-esque painting Staffa, Fingal’s Cave emerges. It is a perfect subject for a painter so consumed by the relationship between the Industrial Revolution, which rocked his era, and the Earth, which it promised so fervently to transform. Staffa can be seen as a precedent, it seems, for Turner’s famous Fighting Temeraire (1838) [Fig. 2], or his Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844) [Fig. 3]. The former deals similarly with a maritime scene, albeit one which is much calmer, as the namesake Temeraire is tugged by a steamboat in what is to be her last voyage. Ghost-like and pale, the ship cuts through the water, outdone and overshadowed by the tug which drags it to its fate. The dramatic sky seems to bid it farewell in a moment of poignancy which leaves Turner’s attitude towards the new industrial age ambiguous to say the least. The later painting of the train thundering across a viaduct creates similar tension between industry and nature. The blur of the cloud becomes indistinguishable from the steam the train emits, much as the steamer at Staffa puffs out a valiant effort to rival the creations of nature. Perhaps we can read this as Turner’s own admission that, a decade or so later, humanity was well on its way to dominance.
Turner, on visiting Staffa in 1831 in order to record scenery for Scott’s The Lord of the Isles, was struck by what he saw: “the sun, getting toward the horizon, burst through the raincloud, angry.” He admitted later that the scene he painted was mainly a contrivance, but can it possibly be a coincidence that the sunset was allowed to remain? Not only did it allow for the projection of a dramatic orange light onto Fingal’s Cave, reminding his audience of the volcanic origins of the island, but it also drew the comparison between steamer and nature into sharper contrast. The sun was setting on an era for Turner and the rest of humanity. How he felt about that remained unclear. Perhaps he did not know. Scotland, crafted in the English Victorian psyche as a land of mystery and myth, where industry was yet to impose itself, where the Sublime was still readily accessible, was the perfect place for this dichotomy to be explored. Never mind the truth, that Staffa was likely nothing new to locals, that people did live in Scotland’s rugged wilds, though by this point the Clearances, which to this day leave rural populations depleted, were well underway.
The point was never honesty for Turner. His painting was a “contrivance, with all the important elements of the image modelled, one might say, from nature and yet against nature.” The push and pull between nature and industry was as strong as the ebb and flow of the waves against Staffa’s cliffs. Slowly, but surely, Turner would come to rationalise it on canvas, and Fingal’s Cave would retain its status as an icon of the natural world, designated a National Nature Reserve in 2001, and still a popular tourist destination in Scotland. The imposition of the nineteenth-century English aristocratic imagination onto Scotland’s landscapes is inescapable, but at least it is no longer a place for debate. In our modern age, when we are all too familiar with the damage wrought on the Earth by industry, Scotland and its sites like Staffa are a monument to nature’s beauty, not to be pitted against human abilities but protected by them.
Bibliography:
Crane, Ralph, and Lisa Fletcher. “Inspiration and Spectacle: The Case of Fingal’s Cave in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 22, vol. 4 (2015): 778-800.
Michael, Jennifer Davis. “Ocean meets Ossian: Staffa as Romantic Symbol.” Romanticism 29, vol. 1 (2007): 1-14.
National Trust for Scotland. “Staffa National Nature Reserve.” Accessed 4th April 2025. https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/staffa
Yale Center for British Art. “Staffa, Fingal’s Cave.” Accessed 4th April 2025. https://interactive.britishart.yale.edu/critique-of-reason/360/staffa-fingals-cave.