Romantic Scotland Gallery1-Fingal’s Cave, Staffa

Fingal’s Cave, Staffa

George Cuit (1743–1818) 
Fingal’s Cave, Staffa
date unknown
Watercolor over graphite 

Staffa is surrounded by cliffs formed from columns of purple-gray basalt. A cleft among them reveals a cave, discovered by Sir Joseph Banks in 1772. His powerfully written description was published in Thomas Pennant’s A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides in 1776: “Compared to this, what are the cathedrals or the palaces built by men!” George Cuit was one of many artists who followed Banks’s description and celebrated the architectonic qualities of the cave. Cuit acknowledges a musical dimension by placing the figure of a lone bagpiper among the basalt stumps. Since the island was uninhabited, this figure might be a figment of the artist’s imagination, or possibly a member of the crew of the boat that conveyed Cuit to the island, and thus an early representative of the tourist industry. 

YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, PAUL MELLON COLLECTION 

B1975.4.1485