A View of Tantallon Castle

Nasmyth developed the landscape style for which he is best known, which invariably involved integrating topographical details of country houses and castles within a picturesque context.

He is recorded as having exhibited three paintings of Tantallon, in addition to this especially dramatic, almost operatic, view, which is thought to date from c. 1816, and is one of the finest of his maritime pictures. A related drawing of a shipwreck is in the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland. It is probable that he chose to treat the subject because the fourteenth-century Tantallon Castle, which is located outside North Berwick, was so memorably described in Sir Walter Scott's epic poem Marmion, along with a 'gathering ocean- storm,' (Nasmyth provided numerous illustrations for collected editions of Scott's poems). He also uses it, however, to explore a type of romantic coastal scene most readily associated with the great mid-eighteenth-century French painter, Claude-Joseph Vernet.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes): Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: The Hebrides Overture ('Fingals Cave')