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J. M. W. Turner Staffa, Fingal's
Cave Staffa is an uninhabited island in the Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland. Famous for its many caves and strange, columnlike formations of purple-gray basalt, it was a tourist attraction even by Turner's time. The most spectacular of the caves was dubbed Fingal's Cave after the hero of the so-called poems of Ossian, a pastiche of northern myths and legends published in 1762-63. Fingal is a warrior king of superhuman proportions, almost a force of nature, for whom a great cave on an island lashed by the sea would seem a fitting habitation. To the Romantic imagination the cave also had the mysterious and spiritual aura of a natural temple. Turner visited Staffa on a stormy afternoon in September 1831, sailing from the larger island of Mull on a tourist paddle-steamer much like the one that appears in his painting. |