The Strasbourg-born painter, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740 – 1812), was already an experienced theatrical artist and a French Academician when David Garrick engaged him as scenic director at Drury Lane in 1771. There he rapidly revolutionised conventional ‘stock’ settings with the rugged Romantic landscape style seen in his easel work, translated on-stage by the use of irregular-profiled cut scenes and setting pieces, often concealing varying levels, and using transparency lighting effects. All were developed further in his ‘Eidophusikon’ (literally ‘same as nature image’), or mechanical theatre, developed from 1781 with the advantage of the newly invented Argand oil light, much brighter than normal ones or candles, to produce even more atmospheric manipulations of season, weather and time of day.

Though his last stage work was the spectacular Captain Cook-based pantomime ‘Omai’ at Covent Garden in 1785 he continued to exhibit dramatic and large-scale landscape, marine and battle paintings (sea and land), and many of these could easily be translated into the receding planes of stage scenery, since all are based on his strength as a decisive draughtsman as well as a master of colour.

The young J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) – born and living until 1799 in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden – was only ten when ‘Omai’ appeared. Whether he saw any of de Loutherbourg’s stage work or the ‘Eidophusikon’ is unknown but he would certainly have seen his oils at the Royal Academy summer exhibitions, where he also started showing watercolours in 1790, ten years after the older man had been elected a full RA member.

There is no doubt Turner was an early admirer of de Loutherbourg, partly for stylistic reasons in his own early work and to the extent that he reputedly visited the latter’s studio so often that Mrs de L., – fearing he was stealing her husband’s secrets – is said to have finally banned him from the house. Whether true or not, since recounted in G.W Thornbury’s often unreliable first biography of Turner (1862), the ‘secrets’ or at least models he was seeking can only have been in oil work, since he was already well trained in watercolour and it was not a medium in which de Loutherbourg generally practised, save for design purposes.

Dramatic confirmation of de Loutherbourg’s influence has now appeared with firm reidentification of Turner’s earliest exhibited oil painting – and apparently the earliest one known, given that it displaces the ‘Fishermen at sea’ exhibited in 1796 (in the Tate) as ‘no. 1’ in Butlin and Joll’s complete catalogue of his oil work. Titled ‘The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent’s Rock, Bristol’ it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1793 with two watercolours (one of the same general location). While its general history is known, the authorship had become muddled over time, partly because the RA catalogues do not specify medium and the signature (now re-found) was lost under very dirty varnish. It was almost certainly painted above his father’s barber’s shop Maiden Lane late in 1792, when was 17, following the second of his two stays in Bristol (1791-2) with family friends who later recalled him as ‘Prince of the Rocks’ for his intrepid sketching in the Avon gorge. Having done (known) compositional studies and the 1793-exhibited ‘View on the river Avon near St Vincent’s Rock’ in watercolour, he could also have been prompted to attempt the newly found painting in oil by the three that de Loutherbourg had shown at the RA earlier in 1792 – his first marine works there since 1785. There is certainly a descriptive similarity between Turner’s boats visibly jostling hazardously at rocky moorings in a rising Avon squall and de Loutherbourg’s 1792 titles: ‘A storm and passage boat running ashore’; ‘A fresh wind, the tide setting in’ and ‘A shipwreck’. Like the latter’s work too, the strongly drawn foreground landscape against a stormy ‘backscene’ could as easily be translated into planes of scenic cut pieces, which is not a general later feature in Turner, even in the already more sophisticated and much larger ‘Fishermen at sea’ of three years later.

Andrew Wilton, a doyen of Turner studies, has recently called the 1793 picture ‘curious in many different ways, not only because it has turned out to be an oil painting [when long thought to have been a watercolour], but in a completely new style at least partly influenced by de Loutherbourg.’ In its stylistic ‘newness’ he is certainly right, since – in oil – it appears ‘a first’, and with none later so patently close to de Loutherbourg.

Unsurprisingly, having been rediscovered after a recent sale in Newbury as by (rather surprisingly) a ‘follower of J.C. Ibbetson’, the new owner who got it for a few hundred pounds in the hope it might be by de Loutherbourg will be selling it at Sotheby’s on 2 July with an estimate of £200,000 to £300,000: see The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent’s Rock, Bristol | Old Master and 19th Century Paintings Evening Auction | 2025 | Sotheby’s

Equally unsurprisingly, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery are very keen to secure it permanently in public hands there and have an unchallengeable case to do so, but are only being allowed to make the attempt without any expenditure of City funds. A ten-day crowd-funding appeal for at least £100,000 to support other pledges of assistance has so far been going very well. While not specifically a theatrical cause, it is a one with its own drama and certainly relevant, through the Loutherbourg connection, to the history and influence of scenic painting. So if you are minded to add pennies to the pot, here is the link: Bring Turner Home – a Creative & Arts crowdfunding project in Bristol by Bristol Museums Development Trust

Pieter van der Merwe

[The author is a Vice-President of the STR and Chairman of the Turner Society, which is supporting the Bristol appeal]