The Storm
William McTaggart (1835 to 1910) · 1890
A gale drives white water on to a rocky shore. The sea fills more than half the canvas in a churning mass of greens, greys and whites, the sky is a smear of racing cloud, and along the shore, if you look closely, tiny figures are gathered, watching a boat in trouble beyond the breakers. McTaggart paints the storm from inside it: the brushstrokes fly across the canvas as if the wind were moving them, and the people are almost swallowed by the weather they are trying to face.
McTaggart was the son of a crofter from Kintyre and he painted the Atlantic coast of Scotland all his life. By the 1890s his handling had become astonishingly free, with paint dragged, scumbled and flicked in a way that has often been compared with the French Impressionists, though he developed it on his own. Stand close and the picture almost dissolves into abstraction; step back and the waves, the rocks and the anxious crowd snap into place. The figures were added last, and their smallness is the emotional point of the painting.
The canvas was painted at Carradale on the Kintyre peninsula and began as a smaller work that McTaggart reworked and enlarged in his studio. It was presented to the gallery in 1935 and now hangs in the Scottish galleries as the great statement of Scottish landscape painting between Turner and the twentieth century. McTaggart's grandson, Sir William MacTaggart, was himself a painter, and the family line runs through the modern Scottish art you see nearby. Few pictures in the building convey so physically what it feels like to stand on a Scottish shore in bad weather.
Did You Know? McTaggart usually painted outdoors in all conditions, and stories tell of him pegging his canvases down against the wind.
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