Squall at St Vincent's Rock, Bristol

A note on the finding of the location

Presented here you have seen how by comparison with two JMW drawings the location of the picture was discovered. However, this identification was not straightforward. The two drawings are held amongst unexhibited works in the Tate Gallery and to reach their online descriptions it is necessary to know their accession numbers or their titles.

At the outset the only features known about this picture was its approximate age and that it was a coastal seapiece. A lengthy internet search of images produced thousands of results and in following image searches with descriptive details and provenances of hundreds of these it became clear that the picture was unlikely to be Dutch (the majority of search results were Dutch) and furthermore that it was unlikely to be a mature work. By discarding Dutch results and looking at pictures painted in the period 1800 to 1805 a number of JMW Turner pictures emerged from the search results. I took these findings to an auction house which confirmed the age of the canvas but 'thought' that it was not a 'Turner' but could not offer an alternative merely saying that the quality of the repair suggested that a previous owner had 'highly valued' the picture.

Still working on the 1800-1805 time frame continued to suggest Turner's work. Some literature was searched and a copy of Butlin and Joll (1984 edition) purchased.

As shown earlier the picture had been cut down on the top and right hand sides. Some comparisons with comments in Butlin and Joll now emerged. In paricular No. 21, 'Rochester Castle with Fishermen Drawing Boats Ashore In A Gale of Wind', said to be Turner's first oil on canvas and to have been painted in Rochester and left in the posession of Rev. James Douglas. There was great similarity between the description in Butlin and Joll and our picture. There was one striking difference in that there was no Rochester Castle in our picture but it could have been cut off. More approaches were made but it became clear that this was a picture that the current art market did not want to be found.

To test the theory of a cut down Rochester Castle images of Turner's Rochester drawings were obtained and this involved the seeking out of as many early Turner drawings as possible to cross reference with Rochester images of the Castle. These drawings were copied off their online sources and saved locally for later examination. Of the Rochester images none remotely offered a layout that suggested that the picture was a cut down Rochester Castle picture. Looking closer at the picture it became evident that the cutting down was only around 1" on the top and right hand edges - it had likely been painted with the canvas on the stretcher.

Every entry in Butlin and Joll was examined. The picture was not mentioned in Butlin and Joll. The enquiry had reached a 'dead end' and the picture was hung in a temporary frame for a few weeks whilst deciding what to do with it. The digital images were collected together, their files named properly and stored. In that process each image was observed 'on-screen'.

This picture has a peculiar quality of changing appearance depending on the direction and quality of the incident light.

One day I walked past the picture which was lit oddly by sunshine illuminating just the tip of the dome rock.