In this scene, the forested escarpment of Otley Chevin that rises above Wharfedale (and then part of Walter Fawkes’s estate) forms the rugged backdrop for woodcock shooting. The hunter is surely William Pilkington, who must have joined the expedition from Farnley Hall, nearby. Slightly downhill, a beater flushes a woodcock from the cover of bracken.
Turner captures it in mid-flight, fixing it in mid-air between two large spruce trees, as the sportsman aims his gun. The shape of its flapping wings is beautifully echoed in the curled, feathery branches.
It is a magnificent observation of an autumnal woodland: the leaves of the deciduous trees have turned pale ochre, while the bracken of the foreground has turned a deeper shade of brown. These warm tones complement the rich shades of the evergreens, which Turner has made even richer and opaquer with the addition of ink. The silvery light reflected in the trunks of the birch trees also suggests autumn.
The watercolour is also a virtuoso display of bravura handling that matches the rough, complex undergrowth. The surface of the painting is really textured: the highlights in the bracken, trees and path have been scratched out (the paint has been scraped off with a blade or finger nail to reveal the white paper beneath). In other areas, such as the sun-drenched limestone, white has been stopped out (a physical barrier has been applied to the page when the watercolour paint was applied). In contrast to these areas of white, Turner has added gum to thicken the paint used for the dark greens of the bracken. Turner has signed and dated the work on the path (‘JMW Turner RA 1813’), as if claiming his own place both in the shooting party and as creator of the image.
The watercolour is based on a drawing made the previous Autumn, in 1812, when Turner was at Farnley to recover from exhaustion. The sketch covers two pages of the Large Farnley Sketchbook showing the rising track (which is barely delineated) with its tall spruce on the first, without the second large spruce that appears in the drawing. On the second page, the view continues downhill from the track, with the beater uphill from two sportsmen, one of whom aims his gun at an invisible woodcock. Turner made some significant changes to the composition between the sketch and the watercolour. He chose only the view shown on the first page as the setting, thereby excluding the open view over the contours of the peaks. He reduced the sporting party to one solitary sportsman, and placed him on higher ground above the beater (who is now down in the undergrowth), granting him and the woodcock greater visual impact. On revisiting the sketch a year later, presumably in his bedroom at Farnley (where he set up a studio), Turner put a lot of creative thought into reimagining this scene and creating the evocative autumnal atmosphere.
The enthusiasm for shooting at Farnley went hand in hand with a shared interest in ornithology. Pilkington, who was himself an amateur artist, contributed with Turner to Walter Fawkes’s project, the five-volume Farnley Ornithological Collection. Turner’s great proponent John Ruskin reported that he asked Turner if he painted many birds, to which the artist responded that ‘Nowhere but at Farnley. He could only do them joyfully there!’
Around this time, and probably while at Farnley, Turner was in the process of working up a series of sketches he had made during his Alpine tour of 1802 into magnificent finished watercolours for Walter Fawkes, who had probably sponsored Turner’s trip. The vertiginous ‘Alpine’ appearance of this track rising through a steep hillside may well have been informed by Turner’s memories of Switzerland. During the period that Turner painted the Wallace Collection watercolours, travel to France was prevented by the Napoleonic Wars, and artists and patrons had to seek the sublime and picturesque in the confines of the British Isles.
The watercolour was catalogued as ‘Woodcock Shooting, scene on the Chiver, with a portrait of Henry Pilkington’ in the Elhanan Bicknell sale of 1863.