Queen Mab's Cave
J. M. W. Turner·after 1846
Historical Context
Turner's Queen Mab's Cave (exhibited 1846) at the Cleveland Museum is a late fantasy painting combining Shakespeare's fairy queen with a dreamlike cave-and-waterfall landscape. Turner's late career included numerous mythological and literary subjects — including treatments of Ovid, Vergil, and Shakespeare — in which his extreme late style, reducing forms to luminous colored mist, found particular freedom in subjects where literal description was not required. Queen Mab, the fairy midwife who delivers men's dreams in Romeo and Juliet, gave Turner licence to dissolve the visible world into pure light and atmosphere, a condition he had been working toward throughout his career. The painting's almost abstract quality anticipates developments in European painting by decades.
Technical Analysis
The late painting shows Turner at his most radically atmospheric, with forms dissolving into veils of color. The cave's interior glows with mysterious light painted in translucent layers of warm yellows and cool blues.
Look Closer
- ◆Notice how the cave interior glows with mysterious light from an unidentifiable source: Turner creates internal illumination without showing the light's origin, making the cave radiant with supernatural presence.
- ◆Look at the waterfall rendered as pure translucent motion: Turner depicts falling water not as solid mass but as a translucent veil of movement, capturing the optical quality of light through water.
- ◆Observe the fairy figures barely distinguishable from the surrounding light: Turner's late technique makes the mythological figures almost identical in substance to the atmosphere surrounding them.
- ◆Find Queen Mab herself within the luminous atmosphere: the fairy queen is suggested rather than depicted, her presence implied by the enchanted light suffusing the entire composition.
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