1846
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Queen Mab's Cave is a 1846 unspecified by Joseph Mallord William Turner, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a swirl of pink, gold, and gray—almost like fog with a hidden cave inside. The colors blur so much it’s hard to tell where the sky ends and the rocks begin. Turner painted this as a smaller version of an earlier work, adding lines from Shakespeare about Queen Mab, the fairy who visits dreams. The original was called confusing even then. This copy keeps the mystery: is that a cave, or just light playing tricks? If you like how Turner turns landscapes into moods, look up chiaroscuro—the way artists use light and shadow to shape a scene.
This work is a reduced copy of a painting first exhibited by Turner at the British Institution in 1846 that passed, with the rest of his immense bequest to the nation, into the collections of the National Gallery and finally, in 1954, the Tate Gallery. Several lines from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Turner's manuscript poem "Fallacies of Hope" were appended to the title in the British Institution catalogue, but they did little to explicate the nearly unintelligible concoction of fairies and Welsh ruins that make up this composition. Copies of Queen Mab's Cave by anonymous…
Queen Mab is a miniature fairy from English folklore who inspires dreams and plays pranks on people during the night. Shakespeare refers to her in both Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream ,
Read the full account in the museum source.
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in 1775 at Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, where his father kept a barber and wig-making shop.
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