Exhibited with the following lines from Sir Walte Scott's Lord of the Isles, Canto IV:

— nor of a theme less solemn tells

That mightly surge that ebbs and swells,

And still, between each awful pause,

From the high vault an answer draws.

Turner was invited by Scott to visit Abbotsford in the late summer of 1831 in connection with a project to illustrate his poems and took the opportunity to visit the Western Isles; he arrived at Staffa in 'a strong wind and head sea', as he wrote later to James Lenox. This picture was the result and is one of the first in which Turner's uniformity of treatment enforces the feeling of the union of all nature's elements against the puny devices of man; the cliffs and the sea on the left are run together in continuous strokes of paint.

The painting was well received at the Royal Academy, though the Athenaeum for 15 June remarked that 'The grandeur of the original, and the awe it impresses on the beholder, may be caught, perhaps, by a painter, but cannot be improved or exalted. Nature, in the original scene, has done her best, and Turner cannot surpass her' . For Fraser's Magazine, July 1832, 'All is in unison in this fine picture, and impresses us with the sublimity of vastness and solitude. When it pleases him to do so, there is no one who can exhibit a greater mastery in these simple, but most powerful effects, swaying the phenomena of nature to his will, and eliciting from its uncombined elements alone that variety and depth of expression which others appear to be either regardless or unconscious of'. The Morning Herald for 7 May remarked on the novelty of the steamboat: 'Mr. Turner's love of yellow, red and blue, is conspicuous in all his works, but in his picture of "Staffa, Fingal's Cave", &c., the effect produced by those colours, when kept subordinate, is truly poetic; he has even flung a charm around that uncouth object yclept a "steam boat", and the black off-spring of its vivid fires' . This was the first Turner to go to America, being bought by James Lenox for £500 in 1845.