'Glaucus and Scylla' Returns to the Kimbell Art Museum

FORT WORTH, TX - Glaucus and Scylla, the Joseph Mallord William Turner painting that the Kimbell Art Museum restituted last year to the heirs of John and Anna Jaffé and subsequently repurchased at auction in April, will be back on view at the Kimbell on Friday, May 4, at noon.  Commented Alain Monteagle, principal Jaffé heir: “Nothing pleases my family and myself more than knowing that Glaucus and Scylla is coming back home to the magnificent Kimbell Art Museum.  The Museum’s virtuous behavior, decency, and transparency throughout the restitution of the painting has been rewarded.

This will be the third painting from the Jaffé collection to be permanently exhibited in a U.S. museum. John and Anna Jaffé loved the U.S., and would also have been glad.”

For its homecoming, the painting will be presented in a square frame, allowing viewers to see the unfinished areas in the corners of the picture, which reveal Turner’s fast and expressive working method.  In recent years, it has been framed—as Turner intended—in a circular format that has left the corners concealed.

The painting, which had been in the Kimbell’s collection since 1966 prior to its restitution last year, shows a mythological scene of unrequited love in which the brilliant setting sun suggests the power of fate.  It is the Museum’s most important British painting, and a canonical example of Turner’s free, luminous, near-abstract late style.