Art lovers flocked to Arbroath from across Scotland on Saturday to feast their eyes on a famous watercolour.
Joseph Mallord William Turner’s striking artwork of the Bell Rock lighthouse left its regular home of Edinburgh’s National Galleries for a pop-up exhibition event at the Signal Tower museum.
National Galleries expert Charlotte Topsfield, the prints and drawings curator at the capital attraction, put on a series of 20-minute talks throughout the day to give an insight into Turner’s life and work.
She also spoke of Turner’s links with Sir Walter Scott who wrote his gothic masterpiece The Antiquary after he was struck by the beauty of an Arbroath house and its surroundings.
The relationship between the pair began in 1818 and culminated in the publication of Turner’s illustrated editions of Scott’s poetry and prose works after the author’s death in 1832.
Turner travelled to Scotland to meet Scott near the end of the latter’s life and made a six-week sketching tour relating to Scott’s poems.
She said: “Turner’s pictures of Scotland embrace a whole range of subject matter.
“He was commissioned by the engineer Robert Stevenson to produce a watercolour of the Bell Rock Lighthouse which he actually did based on drawings by another artist and on Stevenson’s wonderfully atmospheric description of what it’s like to be at the Bell Rock Lighthouse in a storm.
“From Turner’s watercolour you can absolutely see how his lifetime painting the sea made him envisualise that experience.”
The artist, widely known as William Turner, was appreciated for his expressive watercolours of landscapes and the marine environment.
He was commissioned by engineer Robert Stevenson to paint the lighthouse which took three years to build 11 miles off the Angus coast.
The Bell Rock painting is a shining example of Turner’s trademark style in capturing turbulent, often violent seascapes.
It forms part of a National Galleries bequest from one of the great connoisseurs of his work, Henry Vaughan, which includes famous works from the 1790s.
The Signal Tower was built in 1813 as a base of operations for the Bell Rock, housing the families of keepers stationed on the lighthouse as well as shore staff.
Its name came from the signalling apparatus on top of the tower used to communicate between the shore-based Master of the Tender and the Bell Rock keepers.
