Dolbadarn Castle: Turner's 1800 Royal Academy Diploma Work

The subject

The round keep of Dolbadarn Castle stands on its rock at the top of the canvas, silhouetted against a pale sky, while the lower two-thirds are given to shadowed rock and the floor of the pass. Small figures near the bottom appear to be escorting a prisoner, and the scale between them and the tower is deliberately brutal.

Catalogue record — Holding institution

Artist	Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)
Date	1800
Exhibited	Royal Academy, 1800
Medium	Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions	1194 x 902 mm
Collection	Royal Academy of Arts, London

Turner had toured North Wales in 1798 and 1799 and filled sketchbooks with the mountains around Llanberis. The castle is real and the drawings are topographically careful, but the finished painting raises the crag, deepens the gloom and compresses the pass until the site becomes a statement instead of a view.

The captive prince

Dolbadarn was associated with Owain Goch, imprisoned there in the thirteenth century by his brother Llywelyn, and Turner attached verse of his own to the catalogue entry invoking the hopeless captive and the majesty of the place. The figures at the foot of the picture are usually read as that imprisonment.

The choice of subject fits a clear pattern in his early work. Welsh and Scottish castles offered British painters a native equivalent of the ruins that made Italian landscape respectable, with the added advantage of genuine history attached, and Turner used them repeatedly throughout the first decade of his career.

The diploma work

Academicians were required to deposit a work on election, and Turner gave this canvas when he became a full member in February 1802. It has remained in the Royal Academy's collection ever since, which makes it the one major early Turner that never entered the Bequest and never passed through the market.

The choice is informative. Asked to select a single picture to represent him permanently inside the institution, a twenty-six-year-old landscape painter picked a dark Welsh mountain subject with a literary and historical charge instead of a marine piece or a topographical view, which is a statement about where he thought landscape should sit.

Where it fits

Painted two years before he first crossed the Channel, this belongs to the period when Turner's sublime was being assembled out of British material. The mountains, the weather and the ruins he needed were available in Wales and the Lake District, and he worked them hard before the Alps became accessible.

The verse habit starts early

Attaching his own poetry to a catalogue entry became a lifelong practice, and this is one of the earliest instances. It signalled literary seriousness to an audience that ranked history painting above landscape, and it let Turner supply the moral of a picture in words instead of paint it in.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Royal Academy's own collection in London, not at Tate, which is why it appears less often in Turner exhibitions than its importance warrants. Seeing it requires a separate visit from the Bequest, and it is the only one of his major early oils held that way.