Front of Salisbury Cathedral

Title

Front of Salisbury Cathedral

Artist

J. M. W. Turner

Status

R. A.

First Exhibited Date

1799

Type

Watercolor on paper

Current Exhibition Location

Birmingham Museums Trust: 1897P9.

Lent By

Mrs. Cash

Catalog Number

8

Catalog Page

2

Catalog Description

“‘Walk to the west front, and there stand for a time, looking up at its deep-pointed porches and the dark places between their pillars, where there were statues once, and where fragments, here and there, of a stately figure, are still left, which has in it the likeness of a king, perhaps, indeed, a king on earth, perhaps a saintly king long ago in heaven; and so higher and higher, up to the great mouldering wall of rugged sculpture and confused arcades, shattered and grey, and grisly with heads of dragons and mocking fiends, worn by the rain, and sometimes formed into yet unseemlier shapes, and coloured on their stony scales by the deep russet-orange lichen, melancholy gold: and so, higher still, to the bleak towers, so far above, that the eye loses itself among the bosses of their traceries, though they are rude and strong, and only sees like a drift of eddying black points the crowd of restless birds."--Ruskin.