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J.M.W. Turner was born on the 23rd of April 1775 at Covent Garden, London. As his 250th anniversary of this internationally appreciated artist is being celebrated this year, it is especially appropriate that we publish new research on the first of his paintings to reach the United States. Turner’s spectacular ‘Staffa, Fingal’s Cave’ (1832) in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, was shipped to New York in September 1845; the circumstances surrounding its transport and reception, as well as the artist’s interest in this, are revealed in a close study by Ian Warrell of the related correspondence, now in the New York Public Library. A rediscovered letter also published this month enriches our understanding of another key nineteenth-century British painting: Edwin Landseer’s ‘The monarch of the glen’ (1849–51; National Galleries of Scotland). The letter by Landseer is analysed by Stephen Duffy, along with the related documentation about the painting’s commission for the House of Lords, leading to a more nuanced understanding of the artist’s unrealised ambitions for the decorative programme in the Palace of Westminster. Eighteenth-century discoveries in the April issue include William Aslet’s assessment of architectural drawings by James Gibbs in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which confirm that he worked on designing the façade of Burlington House, London – an especially complex and ambitious commission.
A wide spectrum of reviews are published in April, which cover exhibitions that range from the work of Rachel Ruysch to Barbara Walker. Exhibition catalogues assessed include studies of the Secession movements, Kaendler’s Meissen porcelain figures and the Ballets Russes. Books on British portrait miniatures, women sculptors, William Butterfield and Paul Huxley are also analysed in depth.