J.M.W. Turner E-Book

Eric Shanes

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 213

Beschreibung

J.M.W. Turner is without a doubt the greatest painter of landscapes and seascapes of all time. His production was prodigious: some 550 oil paintings, more than 2,000 extremely detailed and refined watercolours and nearly 20,000 studies, sketches and watercolour sketches. He excelled in all forms of painting: landscapes or seascapes, elaborate historical representations or classical scenes, miniature and watercolours of scenes of daily life on land and on sea, destined to be reproduced in engravings. The ensemble of Turner’s artwork evokes a particularly rich and dramatic sensibility, an interest for the complexities of life, an unequalled approach of the size and scale of nature, and a profound curiosity to discover what is under the surface – that which the painter calls the intrinsic “qualities and causes” of things. This curiosity leads Turner to explore the universal principles of architecture – whether it is born from nature or by man’s hand −, of light, of meteorology as well as of the dynamic of waves. He was a talented and extremely sophisticated colourist, becoming one of the best in European painting, and without a doubt the most skilled painter in conveying subtleties and nuances. His works, particularly his last works, reflect his projection of an ideal world of colours, forms and impressions.

Leseprobe

Eric Shanes

Text: Eric Shanes

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ISBN: 978-1-64461-840-0

Contents

The Life

His Work

The Fighting ‘Téméraire’, tugged to her Last Berth to be broken up, 1838,1839

Caernarvon Castle, North Wales, 1800

Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps, 1812

Crossing the Brook, 1815

Dido building Carthage; or, the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire, 1815

The Battle of Trafalgar, 1822-1824

Ulysses deriding Polyphemus – Homer’s Odyssey, 1829

The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834, 1835

Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon coming on, 1840

The Lauerzersee, with the Mythens, c.1848

St Anselm’s Chapel, with part of Thomas-à-Becket’s crown, Canterbury Cathedral, 1794

The Clyde, c.1845

Pope’s Villa at Twickenham,1808

Dolbadern Castle, North Wales, 1800

Trancept of Ewenny Priory, Glamorganshire, 1797

Fall of the Reichenbach, in the valley of Oberhasli, Switzerland, 1804

Fishermen at Sea, 1796

Crook of Lune, looking towards Hornby Castle, c.1817

The Seat of William Moffatt Esq., at Mortlake, Early (Summer’s) Morning, 1826.

Mortlake Terrace, the Seat of William Moffatt, Esq. Summer’s Evening, 1827

Dutch Boats in a Gale: Fishermen Endeavouring to put their Fish on Board, 1801

Calais Pier, with French Poissards preparing for Sea: an English Packet arriving, 1803

The Shipwreck, 1805

Rye, Sussex, c. 1823

The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire – Rome being determined on the Overthrow of her Hated Rival, demanded from her such Terms as might either force her into War, or ruin her by Compliance: the Enervated Carthaginians, in their Anxiety for Peace, consented to give up even their Arms and their Children, 1817

Rain, Steam, and Speed – the Great Western Railway, 1844

The Archbishop’s Palace, Lambeth, 1790

Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, 1796

Interior of Salisbury Cathedral, looking towards the North Transept, c.1802-5

The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons, 1810

Mount Vesuvius in Eruption, 1817

Marxbourg and Brugberg on the Rhine, 1820

Dover Castle, December 1822

A Storm (Shipwreck), 1823

Forum Romanum, for Mr Soane’s Museum, 1826

Northampton, Northamptonshire, Winter 1830-31

The Golden Bough, 1834

Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute, 1835

Flint Castle, North Wales, 1835

Modern Italy – The Pifferari, 1838

Ancient Rome: Agrippina landing with the Ashes of Germanicus. The Triumphal Bridge and Palace of the Caesars restored, 1839

Venice: A Storm in the Piazzetta, c.1840

Venice: the Grand Canal looking towards the Dogana, c.1840

The Blue Rigi: Lake Lucerne, sunrise, 1842

Lake Lucerne: the Bay of Uri from above Brunnen, 1842

Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich, 1842

The Pass of Faido, 1843

Whalers, 1845

Yacht approaching the Coast, c.1850

Petworth Park, with Lord Egremont and his Dogs; Sample Study, c.1828

Biography

List of illustrations

1. J.M.W. Turner Tom Tower, Christ Church, Oxford, 1792, Pencil and watercolour on white paper, 27.2 x 21.5 cm. Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London.

The Life

From darkness to light: perhaps no painter in the history of western art evolved over a greater visual span than Turner. If we compare one of his earliest exhibited masterworks, such as the fairly low-keyed St Anselm’s Chapel, with part of Thomas-à-Becket’s crown, Canterbury Cathedral of 1794, with a vividly bright picture dating from the 1840s, such as The Clyde (both of which are reproduced below), it seems hard to credit that the two images stemmed from the same hand, so vastly do they differ in appearance. Yet this apparent disjunction can easily obscure the profound continuity that underpins Turner’s art, just as the dazzling colour, high tonality and loose forms of the late images can lead to the belief that the painter shared the aims of the French Impressionists or even that he wanted to be some kind of abstractionist, both of which notions are untrue. Instead, that continuity demonstrates how single-mindedly Turner pursued his early goals, and how magnificently he finally attained them. To trace those aims and their achievement by means of a selective number of works, as well as briefly to recount the artist’s life, is the underlying purpose of this book.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born at 21 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, sometime in late April or early May 1775. (The artist himself liked to claim that he was born on 23 April which is both our national day, St George’s Day, and William Shakespeare’s birthday, although no verification of that claim has ever been found.) His father, William, was a wig-maker who had taken to cutting hair after wigs began to go out of fashion in the 1770s. We know little about Turner’s mother, Mary (née Marshall), other than that she was mentally unbalanced, and that her instability was exacerbated by the fatal illness of Turner’s younger sister, who died in 1786. Because of the stresses put upon the family by these afflictions, in 1785 Turner was sent to stay with an uncle in Brentford, a small market town to the west of London. It was here he first went to school. Brentford was the county town of Middlesex, and had a long history of political radicalism, which may have surfaced much later in Turner’s work. But more importantly, the surroundings of the town – the rural stretches of the Thames downriver to Chelsea, and the countryside upriver to Windsor and beyond – must have struck the boy as Arcadian (especially after the squalid surroundings of Covent Garden), and done much to form his later visions of an ideal world.

By 1786 Turner was attending school in Margate, a small holiday resort on the Thames estuary far to the east of London. Some drawings from this stay have survived and they are remarkably precocious, especially in their grasp of the rudiments of perspective. His formal schooling apparently completed, by the late 1780s Turner was back in London and working under various architects or architectural topographers. They included Thomas Malton, Jr, whose influence on his work is discernible around this time.

After Turner had spent a term as a probationer at the Royal Academy Schools, on 11 December 1789 the first President of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), personally interviewed and admitted him to the institution. The Royal Academy Schools was then the only regular art training establishment in Britain. Painting was not taught there – it would only appear on the curriculum in 1816 – and students merely learned to draw, initially from plaster casts of antique statuary and then, when deemed good enough, from the nude. It took the youth about two and a half years to make the move. Amongst the Visitors or teachers in the life class were History painters such as James Barry RA and Henry Fuseli RA whose lofty artistic aspirations would soon rub off on the young Turner. Naturally, as Turner lived in the days before student grants, he had to earn his keep from the beginning.

In 1790 he exhibited in a Royal Academy Exhibition for the first time, and with a few exceptions he went on participating in those annual displays of contemporary art until 1850. In that era the Royal Academy only mounted one exhibition every year, and consequently the show enjoyed far more impact than it does today, swamped as it now is by innumerable rivals (some of the best of which are mounted by the Royal Academy itself). Turner quickly provoked highly favourable responses to his vivacious and inventive offerings.

In 1791 he briefly supplemented his income by working as a scene painter at the Pantheon Opera House in Oxford Street. This contact with the theatre bore long-term dividends by demonstrating that the covering of large areas of canvas held no terrors, that light could be used dramatically and that the stage positionings of actors and props could usefully be carried over to the staffing of images. Thus in his mature works Turner would often place his figures and/or objects in downstage left, centre and right locations when he especially wanted us to notice them.

At the 1792 Royal Academy Exhibition Turner also received a lesson that would eventually move his art into dimensions of light and colour previously unknown to painting. He was especially struck by a watercolour, Battle Abbey, by Michael Angelo Rooker ARA (1746-1801), and copied it twice in watercolour (the Rooker is today in the Royal Academy collection, London, while both of Turner’s copies reside in the Turner Bequest). Rooker was unusually adept in minutely differentiating the tones of masonry (tone being the range of a given colour from light to dark). The exceptionally rich spectrum of tones Rooker had deployed in his Battle Abbey demonstrated something vital to Turner. He emulated Rooker’s multiplicity of tones not only in his two copies but also in many elaborate drawings made later in 1792. Very soon the young artist attained the ability to differentiate tones with even more subtlety than the master he emulated.

The technical procedure used for such tonal variation was known as the ‘scale practice’, and it was rooted in the inherent nature of watercolour. Because watercolour is essentially a transparent medium, it requires its practitioners to work from light to dark (for it is very difficult to place a light mark over a darker one but not the reverse). Instead of mixing up a palette containing all of the many tones he required for a given image, Turner instead copied Rooker and mixed up merely one tone at a time before placing it at different locations across a sheet of paper. Then, while that work dried, he would take some of the remaining tonal mixture off his palette and brush it onto various locations in further watercolours, which were laid out around his studio in a production line. By the time he returned to the first drawing it would have dried. Turner would then slightly darken the given colour on his palette and add the next ‘note’ down the tonal ‘scale’ from light to dark to this work and its successors.

Naturally, such a process saved enormous time, for it did not require the simultaneous creation of a vast range of tones, which would also have required a huge palette and a multitude of brushes, one for each tone. And as well as permitting the production of large numbers of watercolours, this procedure helped with the reinforcement of spatial depth, for because the finishing touches would always be the darkest tones mixed on a palette, their placement in the foreground of an image would help suggest the maximum degree of recession beyond them. Before too long Turner would enjoy an unrivalled ability to differentiate the most phenomenally minute degrees of light and dark, and eventually he would become the most subtle tonalist in world art.

2. J.M.W. Turner, Folly Bridge and Bacon’s Tower, Oxford, 1787, pen and ink with watercolour, 30.8 x 43.2 cm, Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London. The work is a transcription of an image made for the Oxford Almanack by Michael Angelo Rooker.

3. J.W. Archer, Attic in Turner’s house in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, said to have been Turner’s first studio, 1852, watercolour, British Museum, London.

Within a good many watercolours created after the summer of 1792 the ability to create subtle tonal distinctions within an extremely narrow range of tones from light to dark already permitted Turner to project a dazzling radiance of light (for very bright light forces tones into an extremely constricted tonal band). And eventually tonal differentiation would free the artist to move into new realms of colour. Thus many of the very late works reproduced in this book are all flooded with fields of pure colour, within which only slightly lighter or darker variants of the same colour were used to denote the people, objects, landscapes and seascapes existing within those areas. Despite the tonal delicacy with which such forms are depicted, they all seem fully concrete. Increasingly, Turner’s powers as a colourist would become stronger and ever more sophisticated, especially after his first visit to Italy in 1819. By the latter half of his life he would develop into one of the finest and most inventive colourists in European painting. That development began early in life, and initially as a result of seeing Rooker’s Battle Abbey in 1792. Turner always took what he required from other artists, and the Rooker watercolour gave him exactly what he wanted just when he needed it most.

In 1793 the Royal Society of Arts awarded the seventeen-year-old its ‘Greater Silver Pallet’ award for landscape drawing. By now the youth was selling works easily, and he supplemented his income throughout the 1790s by giving private lessons. And on winter evenings between 1794 and 1797 he met with various artists – including another leading young watercolourist, Thomas Girtin (1775-1802) – at the home of Dr Thomas Monro. This physician was a consultant to King George III and a doctor specialising in mental illness who would later treat Turner’s mother. (She would subsequently die in his care in 1804.) Monro had established an unofficial artistic ‘academy’ in his house in Adelphi Terrace overlooking the Thames, and he paid Turner three shillings and sixpence per evening plus a supper of oysters to tint copies made in outline by Girtin from works by a number of artists, including Antonio Canaletto (1697-1768), Edward Dayes (1763-1804), Thomas Hearne (1744-1817) and John Robert Cozens (1752-1797), who at the time was a mental patient under the supervision of Dr Monro. Naturally, Turner absorbed the influence of all these painters, and the breadth of Cozens’s landscapes particularly impressed him, as it did Tom Girtin.

Further important artistic influences upon Turner during the 1790s were Thomas Gainsborough RA (1727-1788), Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg RA (1740-1812), Henry Fuseli RA (1741-1825) and Richard Wilson RA (1713?-1782). Gainsborough’s Dutch-inspired landscapes led Turner to a liking for those selfsame types of scenes, while de Loutherbourg especially influenced the way that Turner painted his figures, varying their style according to the type of images in which they appeared. Fuseli’s approach to the human form may occasionally be detected in Turner’s works as well. An appreciation of the pictures of Richard Wilson, who had grafted an Italianate style onto British scenery, soon led Turner to a passionate liking for the works of Claude Gellée (known as Claude le Lorrain, 1600-1682) who had heavily influenced Wilson and who proved to be the most enduring pictorial influence upon Turner for the rest of his life. Yet from his mid-teens onwards, one overriding aesthetic influence came to shape Turner’s thinking about his art, and not surprisingly it derived from within the Royal Academy itself, albeit mostly through reading rather than from being imparted directly. This was the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Turner had attended the last of Reynolds’s lectures or Discourses in December 1790, and from reading the rest of them he seems to have assimilated or responded to all of Reynolds’s lessons concerning the idealizing aspirations for art that were so eloquently set forth in those fifteen talks. In order to understand Turner’s overall creative development, it is vital to perceive it in the context of Reynolds’s teachings. In his Discourses Reynolds not only set forth a comprehensive educational programme for aspiring artists; he also upheld the central idealizing doctrine of academic art that had evolved since the Italian Renaissance. This can validly be termed the Theory of Poetic Painting. It maintained that painting and sculpture are disciplines akin to poetry, and that their practitioners should therefore attempt to attain an equivalence to the profound humanism, mellifluity of utterance, aptness of language, measure and imagery, grandeur of scale, and moral discourse of the most exalted poetry and poetic dramas.

From the mid-1790s onwards we encounter Turner setting out to realise all of these ambitions. Thus his landscapes and seascapes rarely lack some human dimension after this time, and frequently their subject-matter is drawn from history, literature and poetry. The images are also increasingly structured to attain the maximum degrees of visual consonance, coherence and mellifluity. The visual equivalent to the aptness of language, measure and imagery encountered in poetry (and to the additional appropriateness of gesture and deportment found in poetic dramas, such as the plays of Shakespeare) was known as ‘Decorum’ in the aesthetic literature known to Reynolds and Turner. Many of the latter’s favourite landscape painters, particularly Claude, Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665) and Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), had often observed such Decorum through matching their times of day, light and weather-effects to the central meanings of their pictures. By 1800 Turner had also begun to create such appropriateness, and an example of this procedure can be witnessed in the watercolour of Caernarvon Castle displayed at the Royal Academy in that year; it is discussed below, as are particularly ingenious observances of Decorum, Pope’s Villa at Twickenham of 1808 and a far better-known later example, The Fighting ‘Temeraire’ of 1839.

Decorum is an associative method, and because Turner possessed an unusually connective mind, he always found it easy to match times of day, light and weather-effects most appropriately to the meanings of his pictures. He also imbued many of his works with associative devices commonly encountered in poetry. These are allusions, or subtle hints at specific meanings; puns or plays upon the similarity of appearances; similes or direct comparisons between forms; and metaphors, whereby something we see doubles for something unseen. Occasionally Turner could even string together his visual metaphors to create complex allegories. (Many of these devices are explored below.) Here Turner was again following Reynolds, who in his seventh Discourse had suggested that, like poets and playwrights, painters and sculptors should use ‘figurative and metaphorical expressions’ to broaden the imaginative dimensions of their art.

In the final, 1790 Discourse attended by Turner, Reynolds had especially celebrated the grandeur of Michelangelo’s art. As early as 1794 Turner began doubling or trebling the size of objects and settings he represented (such as trees, buildings, ships, hills and mountains) in order to aggrandize them greatly. He would continue to do so for the rest of his life, in ways that ultimately make his landscapes and seascapes seem every bit as grand as the figures of Michelangelo.

4. J.M.W. Turner, The Pantheon, the morning after the fire, RA 1792, watercolour, 39.5 x 51.5 cm, Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London. The Pantheon Opera House in Oxford Street, London, was burnt down by arsonists on 14 February 1792. Turner may have worked there as a scene-painter during the previous year.

5. J.M.W. Turner, The Passage of Mount St Gothard, taken from the centre of the Teufels Broch (Devil’s Bridge), Switzerland, signed and dated 1804, watercolour, 98.5 x 68.5 cm, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria.

And by 1796, with a watercolour of Llandaff cathedral (reproduced here), Turner also began making moral points in his works. Often he would comment upon both the brevity of human life and of our civilisations, our frequent indifference to that transience, the destructiveness of mankind, and on much else besides. To that end, and equally to expand the temporal range of his images, from 1800 onwards he starting making complementary pairs of works; usually these were on identically-sized supports and created in the same medium, although not invariably so (for example, see the Dolbadern Castle and Caernarvon Castle discussed below, which are respectively an oil and a watercolour). In these and other ways he responded keenly to Reynolds’s demand that artists should be moralists, putting human affairs in a judgemental perspective. And linked to the moralism was Reynolds’s admonition that artists should not concern themselves with arbitrary or petty human experience but instead investigate the universal truths of our existence, as they are commonly explored in the highest types of poetry and poetic drama. To further this end, Reynolds entreated artists to go beyond the emulation of mere appearances and convey what Turner himself would characterise in an 1809 book annotation as ‘the qualities and causes of things’, or the universal truths of behaviour and form.

We shall return to Turner’s approach to the universals of human existence presently. But from the mid-1790s onwards he began to express ‘the qualities and causes of things’ in his representations of buildings, as can readily be seen in the 1794 watercolour of St Anselm’s Chapel, Canterbury reproduced below. In works like this we can already detect a growing comprehension of the underlying structural dynamics of man-made edifices. Within a short time, in watercolours such as the Trancept of Ewenny Priory, Glamorganshire of 1797 (also reproduced below), this insight would become complete. And because Turner believed that the underlying principles of manmade architecture derived from those of natural architecture, it was but a short step to understanding geological structures too. Certainly, Turner made apparent the ‘qualities and causes’ of the latter types of forms by early in the following century (for example, see the rock stratification apparent in The Fall of the Reichenbach, in the valley of Oberhasli, Switzerland of 1804 reproduced below).

From the mid-1790s onwards we can simultaneously detect Turner’s thorough apprehension of the fundamentals of hydrodynamics. The Fishermen at Sea of 1796 (reproduced below) demonstrates how fully the painter already understood wave-formation, reflectivity and the underlying motion of the sea. From this time onwards his depiction of the sea would become ever more masterly, soon achieving a mimetic and expressive power that is unrivalled in the history of marine painting. Undoubtedly there have been, and still are, many marine painters who have gone far beyond Turner in the degrees of photographic realism they have brought to the depiction of the sea. Yet none of them has come within miles – nautical miles, naturally – of expressing the fundamental behaviour of water. By 1801, when Turner exhibited ‘The Bridgewater Seapiece’ (reproduced below), his grasp of such dynamics was complete.

By that time also the painter had simultaneously begun to master the essential dynamics of cloud motion, thereby making apparent the fundamental truths of meteorology, a comprehension he fully attained by the mid-1800s. Only his trees remained somewhat mannered during the decade following 1800. However, between 1809 and 1813 Turner gradually attained a profound understanding of the ‘qualities and causes’ of arboreal forms, and thereafter replaced a rather old-fashioned mannerism in his depictions of trunks, boughs and foliage with a greater sinuousness of line and an increased sense of the structural complexity of such forms. By 1815 that transformation was complete, and over the following decades, in works such as Crook of Lune, looking towards Hornby Castle and the two views of Mortlake Terrace dating from 1826 and 1827 (all three of which are reproduced below), Turner’s trees would become perhaps the loveliest, most florescent and expressive natural organisms to be encountered anywhere in art.

All these various insights are manifestations of Turner’s idealism, for they subtly make evident the ideality of forms, those essentials of behaviour that determine why a building is shaped the way it is in order to stand up, why a rockface or mountain appears as it does structurally, what forces water to move as it must, what determines the way clouds are shaped and move, and what impels plants and trees to grow as they do. No artist has ever matched Turner in the insight he brought to these processes. This was recognised even before his death in 1851 by some astute critics, especially John Ruskin who in his writings extensively explored the artist’s grasp of the ‘truths’ of architecture, geology, the sea, the sky and the other principal components of a landscape or marine picture.

In order to create idealised images, throughout his life Turner followed a procedure recommended by Reynolds. This was ideal synthesis, which was a way of overcoming the arbitrariness of appearances. Reynolds accorded landscape painting a rather lowly place in his artistic scheme of things because he held landscapists to be mainly beholden to chance: if they visited a place, say, when it happened to be raining, then that was how they would be forced to represent it if they were at all ‘truthful’. In order to avoid this arbitrariness, Reynolds recommended another kind of truth in landscape painting. This was the practice of landscapists like Claude le Lorrain, who had synthesized into fictive and ideal scenes the most attractive features of several places as viewed in the most beautiful of weather and lighting conditions, thus transcending the arbitrary. Although Turner gave more weight to representing individual places than Reynolds was prepared to permit, this individuation was largely offset by a wholehearted adoption of the synthesizing practice recommended by Reynolds (so much so that often his representations of places bore little resemblance to actualities). As Turner would state around 1810:

To select, combine and concentrate that which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art is as much the business of the landscape painter in his line as in the other departments of art.

And Turner equally overcame arbitrariness by employing his unusual powers of imagination to the full. He stated his belief in the supremacy of the imagination in a paraphrase of Reynolds that stands at the very core of his artistic thinking: