J.M.W. Turner’s Pembroke Castle: Clearing Up of a Thunderstorm (1806)

ALAN HEWELL J.M.W. Turner's Pembroke Castle: Clearing Up ofa Thunderstorm (1806) As the title of this watercolour suggests, its explicit focus is Pembroke Harbour, shortly after a storm. Like many of Turner's paintings, this one is about the interaction of human beings with the more powerful forces of nature. Sea and sky dominate the painting. The water is still rough, the winds still high. In the distance, Pembroke Castle stands like a fortified beachhead, yet in its dark stony stillness it seems dwarfed by the natural forces that surround it and which it seeks to withstand. In the middle distance, the boats that had previously sought refuge in the harbour now race out to sea. Two kinds of English power seem to be portrayed here. On one hand, there is Pembroke Castle which,like Constable's Hadleigh Castle, expresses an older idea of Englishness, linked to the power of its fortifications , a fortress that braves the weather. On the other, a new kind of power is expressed in the English commercial and fishing fleets, which derive their strength not from struggling against nature, but by precariously riding the waves and employing the winds to their advantage. For Turner, England was an island nation, its strength and security closely linked to the sea that surrounded it and to the power of its commercial fleets. Pembroke Castle: Clearing Up ofa Thunderstorm can be said then to be both a marinescape and a historical painting, for it sets a new idea of English strength, the boats, against an older one, the castle,juxtaposing the present with the past. Throughout his life, Turner was fascinated by the sea, by its power, its dangers, and itsmysteries, and in this painting the harbour is crowded with boats engaged in fishing and commerce. Yet of more immediate concern is the narrow strip of shoreline that runs across the foreground of the painting. Given the sense of the balancing ofcosmic and human orders that shapes most of the painting, Turner's portrayal of the beach is strikingly discomfiting, for it is littered with wreckage and dead fish - mackerel, halibut, and cod. Fish can be painted in a reasonably pleasing manner. These ones, however, are stiffer than boards (Turner even seems to have placed two of them beside planks as a means of our comparison), their mouths gape, and their eyes stare back at the viewer. Meanwhile, an enormous crab scuttles among the mussels to regain the water. Turner's fascination with the sea was very much an expression of his time. This painting was executed at the moment in history when European seaside resorts were just beginning to celebrate the wonders of a seaside UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 66, NUMBER 2., SPRING 1997 J.M.W. TURNER 427 J.M.W. Turner, English (1775-1851) Pembroke Castle: Cleflring Up ofa Thunderstorm, 1806 watercolour and body-colour over pencil, with scraping out, 67.0 x 104.5 em (sight) Art Gallery of Ontario, NCX,O holiday, with its promise of better health - through the salubrious qualities of sea air and sea bathing- and the increased capacity to appreciate narure, through the collection of sea-shells and other marine life. In Julian and Maddalo, for instance, Shelley recounts the pleasure that he and Lord Byron experienced in riding on the Lido of Venice: a bare strand Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand, Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds, Such as the earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds,' Is this. I love all waste And solitary places. (lines 3-7,14-15) Shelley, like Turner, celebrates this 'narrow space' of waste. Yet prior to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the seaside, for rnostpeople, was not a place of positive experience. The beach was largely productive of fear and repulsion, for it was there that the sea threw up its monsters and cast back its impurities. To walk along the shoreline was to experience a host of bad smells and to see the filth or excreta thrown up by the sea even the salty foam was believed to be the ocean's sweat. In this painting, 428 ALAN BEWELL we still see remnants...