Dundee Art Galleries & Museum: 272-1987-82
Artist: Forrest, William
Date: 1867
State: 1/1
Size: 17.2 x 25.4 cm
Medium: Steel Engraving
| Details | Steel engraving. Inscription along bottom ‘Sam Bough ARSA’, ‘William Forrest’. |
| Description | The engraving, based on Sam Bough’s painting of the same name (unlocated), was commissioned for the Royal Association’s publication Six Engravings in Illustration of The Antiquary for the Members of the Royal Association for Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland. Edinburgh, the Royal Association. It was plate three in the series.Orchar owned a number of paintings and watercolours by Sam Bough and was an admirer of Scott’s novels on which his The Antiquary (1816) this scene is based. During the novel the storm itself takes place somewhere along the east coast of Scotland. The scene depicts the characters Sir Arthur and Isabella Wardour and Edie Ochiltree sheltering from the formentioned storm;
It was indeed a dreadful evening. The howling of the storm mingled with the shrieks of the sea-fowl, and sounded like the dirge of the three devoted beings, who, pent between two of the most magnificent, yet most dreadful objects of nature—a raging tide and an insurmountable precipice—toiled along their painful and dangerous path, often lashed by the spray of some giant billow, which threw itself higher on the beach than those that had preceded it. Each minute did their enemy gain ground perceptibly upon them! Still, however, loth to relinquish the last hopes of life, they bent their eyes on the black rock pointed out by Ochiltree. It was yet distinctly visible among the breakers, and continued to be so, until they came to a turn in their precarious path, where an intervening projection of rock hid it from their sight. Deprived of the view of the beacon on which they had relied, they now experienced the double agony of terror and suspense. They struggled forward, however; but, when they arrived at the point from which they ought to have seen the crag, it was no longer visible: the signal of safety was lost among a thousand white breakers, which, dashing upon the point of the promontory, rose in prodigious sheets of snowy foam, as high as the mast of a first-rate man-of-war, against the dark brow of the precipice. Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary, 1816 |
| Other Collections | Common although none located with the inscriptions so far. |
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