WRECKERS OF NORTHUMBERLAND

THe Wreckers-J M W Turner

This oil painting by Turner is in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art. It might be seen as a pictorial libel of the good fisher folk of Craster for Northumberland does have a fine record in terms of life-saving. The Boulmer lifeboat service was founded in 1825, in the decade before this painting was made.There was a life boat at Blyth from 1808 and Grace Darling  was to perform her epic rescue in 1838. So perhaps Turner's painting is a little anachronistic and may not quite quite match the facts as known.

But then again there were  supposedly two kinds of wreckers.The idea of wreckers as people who lure ships to destruction seems to have much less credibility than the idea that folk would take the cargo and anything else they could get from wrecked ships. Just what Turner was intending in this picture is not entirely clear .The group on the seashore appear to be hauling something  to land.The temptation to collect something useful must have been considerable and it is likely that country folk regarded this activity as on a par with poaching.

Turner had first visited Dunstanburgh in 1797 and here interprets the scene with considerable freedom. He has the relationship of the main towers to each other but forgets that the keep is not perched over a precipitous drop. He is perfectly correct that there is a considerable drop from the base of the   Lilburn tower to the top of  the Egyncleugh tower tower-a fact which many artists get wrong.

You can see several of Turner's paintings of Dunstanburgh in David Hill's Turner in the North published by Yale in 1997. Hill illustrates a Dunstanburgh from c 1828 which shows a customs officer arriving to supervise the salvage of a wreck.This watercolour is in the Manchester City Art Gallery.

An Optical Illusion at Dunstanburgh

I often visit Craster and the area round about. It is one of my favourite places. Dunstanburgh interests me from the point of Northumbrian history and as an artist I love the play of light on the castle ruins and the constantly changing colours of the bracken and grass through the seasons.I have explored the area a lot as a landscape painter and from one point up on the heugh you can see an example of a classic optical illusion.

Dunstanburgh from the Heugh

When  you look at the horizon in this photo above  I believe that you will see that on the right the horizon appears to be somewhat higher than it does on the left of the picture. This isn't really the case as you can see where I have superimposed a grey  layer on the second picture with a  straight line running along the horizon.

And another view where the illusion is even more obvious.

The illusion is  presumably caused because our eyes/ brain is disturbed by the mass of the castle in the centre of the picture and cannot, so to speak, join the two parts of the horizon line. On the left there is the steep fall of the land below the Lilburn tower  which, I would say, adds to the confusion. The silhouette of the castle itself may be an additional difficulty.

The bent or broken line illusion was discovered in the 1860s by JC Poggendorf a physicist. You can learn more about this illusion here and in this PDF