The Life and Masterworks of J.M.W. Turner E-Book

Eric Shanes

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 347

Beschreibung

At fifteen, Turner was already exhibiting View of Lambeth. He soon acquired the reputation of an immensely clever watercolourist. A disciple of Girtin and Cozens, he showed in his choice and presentation of theme a picturesque imagination which seemed to mark him out for a brilliant career as an illustrator. He travelled, first in his native land and then on several occasions in France, the Rhine Valley, Switzerland and Italy. He soon began to look beyond illustration. However, even in works in which we are tempted to see only picturesque imagination, there appears his dominant and guiding ideal of lyric landscape. His choice of a single master from the past is an eloquent witness for he studied profoundly such canvases of Claude as he could find in England, copying and imitating them with a marvellous degree of perfection. His cult for the great painter never failed. He desired his Sun Rising through Vapour and Dido Building Carthage to be placed in the National Gallery side by side with two of Claude’s masterpieces. And, there, we may still see them and judge how legitimate was this proud and splendid homage. It was only in 1819 that Turner went to Italy, to go again in 1829 and 1840. Certainly Turner experienced emotions and found subjects for reverie which he later translated in terms of his own genius into symphonies of light and colour. Ardour is tempered with melancholy, as shadow strives with light. Melancholy, even as it appears in the enigmatic and profound creation of Albrecht Dürer, finds no home in Turner’s protean fairyland – what place could it have in a cosmic dream? Humanity does not appear there, except perhaps as stage characters at whom we hardly glance. Turner’s pictures fascinate us and yet we think of nothing precise, nothing human, only unforgettable colours and phantoms that lay hold on our imaginations. Humanity really only inspires him when linked with the idea of death – a strange death, more a lyrical dissolution – like the finale of an opera.

Leseprobe

Text: Eric Shanes

© 2023 Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA

© 2023 Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

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CREDITS

© The Trustees of the British Museum, Illustrations 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19

Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford, Illustrations 1, 2, 3

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK

Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, USA, Illustrations 1, 2, 3, 4

Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, UK, Illustrations 1, 2, 3

Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland

Photo © the National Gallery of Ireland

Photo © National Museums Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery, Illustrations 1, 2

Royal Academy of Arts, London

© Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum, Illustrations 1, 2, 3

Tate Britain, Illustrations 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44

Tate Gallery

Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Illustrations 1, 2, 3

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case we would appreciate notification.

ISBN: 978-1-78310-734-6

Eric Shanes

The Life and Masterworks

Self-Portrait, c. 1798.

Oil on canvas, 74.5 x 58.5 cm.

Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London, U.K.

For two avid Turner admirers,Marilyn and Jeremy Roberts,with much love

This book is a revised, expanded and updated fourth edition of Turner/The Masterworks by Eric Shanes which was first published in London in 1990.

Note to the Reader:

CONTENTS

For two avid Turner admirers, Marilyn and Jeremy Roberts, with much love

PREFACE

THE LIFE

THE MASTERWORKS OF J.M.W. TURNER

TURNER AND HIS CRITICS

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHRONOLOGY

J.M.W. Turner, Lake of Lucerne, from the landing place at Fluelen,looking towards Bauen and Tell’schapel, Switzerland, signed on

barrel to right JMWT, c. 1810, exhibited R.A. 1815, watercolour over

pencil with scratching-out, stopping-out and gum arabic in

original frame, 66 x 100 cm (26 x 39 inches), Private Collection.

PREFACE

We gaze across a vast lake surrounded by huge, gleaming mountains. In the distance a heavy storm has moved off, leaving in its wake an atmosphere brimming with moisture and a world beginning to steam in the brilliant dawn sunshine. Not far away a group of travellers which has been drenched by the storm while out on the waters is alighting from a small ferry boat, their belongings and cargo strewn across the beach. On the right a girl sniffles into a handkerchief, possibly crying over the spilt milk that lies before her but more probably because her recent, chillingly damp experience has given her a head cold. Further off more boats approach, while near the very tip of the headland in the far distance to the right can just be made out the chapel first created in 1388 and rebuilt in 1638 that was dedicated to the memory of the Swiss fighter for liberty, William Tell.

Such is the immediacy of the image that one might be forgiven for thinking that it was made on the spot but that was certainly not the case. Instead, it was conjured forth from a very slight pencil drawing made by the lakeside, plus an amalgam of memories and observations that were not necessarily gleaned at this place. Above all it stemmed from an imagination that was powerful, passionate and prodigious. Nobody knows exactly when Joseph Mallord William Turner created Lake of Lucerne, from the landing place at Fluelen, looking towards Bauen and Tell’schapel, Switzerland but it probably dates from around 1810, and thus some eight years after the twenty-seven year old artist had visited Switzerland. The work was developed in the medium of watercolour, a vehicle that before Turner had usually been employed far less expressively to communicate the dry facts about a place and its occupants. Because of the large size of the drawing, plus its combination of spatial breadth, intricate detail and wide tonal range, it might easily be mistaken for an oil painting. Such a misapprehension would only be intensified by the ornate gold frame that first enclosed the image and which has remained around it ever since. Turner certainly intended to mislead us in this way.

Would anyone need to be told that The Lake of Lucerne, from the landing place at Fluelen is a work of art? Does it not inherently define what constitutes such an object? After all, an image of this quality could not have been made by just anyone. Clearly it must have been formed by a uniquely endowed individual possessed of outstanding visionary powers, a high degree of insight into the appearances and behaviour of the natural world (which of course includes our own species), a total command of pictorial language, an absolute rule over the medium chosen for its creation and, not least of all, a feeling for both enormous breadth and tiny detail, the latter of which was amassed by means of an extraordinary degree of patience. In an age like our own, when cultural, social and political levelling and relativism (not to mention critical cowardice) permits anything from a urinal to an empty room, some cuttings of pubic hair or an act of self-mutilation to constitute “a work of art”, a watercolour like the Lake of Lucerne, from the landing place at Fluelen still makes it clear that a true work of art presents us with something superhuman, exceptional and magical. Why these three things? Because any outstanding dramatic, musical, literary or visual work invariably draws upon powers far beyond our own to lift us onto a plane that is more imaginatively powerful, emotionally thrilling and intellectually stimulating than the mundane one we normally occupy. Like many of Turner’s other works, Lake of Lucerne, from the landing place at Fluelen elevates us to that level most ardently and easily.

It was with watercolours demonstrating exceptional qualities that Turner first attracted public attention in the early 1790s, before he had yet turned twenty. As time went on, and as he developed his abilities as an exceptional oil painter, draughtsman and printmaker as well as a watercolourist, so too appreciation of his works flourished, to the extent that by 1815, the very year in which Lake of Lucerne, from the landing place at Fluelen was first seen publicly, an anonymous writer could term the artist “The First Genius of the Day”. In an age of creative giants such as Beethoven, Schubert, Goethe, Byron, Keats, Delacroix et al., that was quite some compliment. Certainly it was not an overblown honour, for Turner does stand tall within such company. Moreover, his popularity has rarely diminished, even if his prices at auction did somewhat decrease between the 1920s and the 1960s. However, since then they have more than bounced back, to the extent that today his works regularly elicit huge prices at auction (as can be witnessed with the Lake of Lucerne, from the landing place at Fluelen, which fetched almost two million pounds when sold in London in July 2005). And beyond the marketplace there are vast numbers of art lovers whose admiration for Turner only grows by leaps and bounds. They simply cannot have too much of him. In 2000-2001 the present writer organised an exhibition of many of Turner’s finest watercolours at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in order to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the painter’s death in 1851. Almost 200,000 people flocked to the show during its eleven-week run; at peak times it could take up to four hours of patient standing in line to obtain entry. Moreover, an even more striking assertion of Turner’s popularity was provided early in 2007 when Tate Britain publicly appealed for funds to purchase the 1842 watercolour The Blue Rigi: Lake Lucerne, sunrise that is reproduced on page 226 below. Of the £4,900,000 sterling that the museum needed for the acquisition to go through, £300,000 was sought directly from the public. Within just five weeks, admirers of Turner both within and beyond British shores had sent in almost double that sum in a ringing endorsement of the need to purchase such a drawing for a major public collection. Clearly, a great many people still recognise a wonderful work of art when they see one, and feel it belongs to them, rather than to some rich private collector.

Yet this is not to say that the acute responsiveness to Turner has not been without its problems. Even in the artist’s own day there were many who could not stomach his daring. During the 1800s and 1810s he was severely criticised for his use of white, so much so that both he and other painters who followed directly in his footsteps were dubbed “the white painters”. Moreover, from the 1820s onwards the artist’s predilection for yellow led to many jokes and snide remarks being made in the newspapers about his pictures. When Turner combined intense yellows with fierce reds, blues and greens, journalistic comparisons abounded between his paintings and food, particularly scrambled eggs and salads. Then there was Turner’s dissolution of form within areas of intense light (which, in his late works, often took over entire images). Many members of a public that was becoming increasingly habituated to the intense verisimilitude of Pre-Raphaelite painting and/or Victorian bourgeois realism could not comprehend what was going on in a late-Turner canvas or watercolour. Even collectors who had previously lined up to purchase the latter kind of works found many of the artist’s late Swiss drawings difficult to understand and wouldn’t buy them.

J.M.W. Turner, The Founder’sTower,Magdalen College, Oxford, 1793, watercolour,

35.7 x 26.3 cm, The British Museum, London, U.K.

J.M.W. Turner, Venice: the Mouth of the Grand Canal, 1840,

watercolour, 21.9 x 31.7 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, U.S.A.

Such problems of visual comprehension could be greatly compounded by Turner’s lifelong construction of covert meanings. Only an entire book given over to this subject (such as the present writer’s 1990 publication, Turner’sHuman Landscape) could even begin to do it justice. But it will suffice here to state that for Turner, landscape painting was a vehicle for expressing his responses to the immense variety of human experience, not just a means of stating his recognition that the world around us is a beautiful or a terrifying place. One way of doing that was to resort to associationism, the creation of chains of ideas by means of visual linkage, metaphor, simile and punning. Because Turner was endowed with an innately complex mind, his meanings are necessarily complex. As a result, they have often mystified his devotees. But to grapple with those meanings must be attempted, for if we ignore them many of Turner’s works remain opaque. In these pages such drifts of meaning will certainly be tackled. For far too long, empty explanations – such as ascribing Turner’s images wholly to a supposed awareness of the “sublime” – has proven a lazy way of avoiding the necessity of taking on the many significations of meaning that were certainly set in motion by the painter.

The failure to understand Turner’s meanings has not been helped by changes in taste either. Thus the gradual emergence of a predilection for French Impressionism led to the widespread belief that Turner was “the First of the Impressionists”. That this misapprehension is now so deeply instilled is perhaps understandable, for it was fostered by many supposedly knowledgeable art critics throughout the twentieth century, and it continues to be propagated. We shall deal with such a false claim below but here it will suffice to emphasise that Turner was most certainly not an Impressionist, even if some of his canvases clearly did exercise a positive influence upon Monet and Pissarro. And then there was Turner’s appropriation by the American Abstract Expressionists. In 1966 he was granted the rare honour for an artist born in the eighteenth century of being accorded a one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The basis for that show was the entirely false premise that, deep down, Turner had really wanted to be an abstract painter but because of the demands of his age, he could only attain that end by disguising his abstraction with the empty trappings of representation, introducing a few meaningless figures here, an occasional boat there or some curious-looking fish elsewhere. Most Turner scholars now think that this was just not the case, for a large body of evidence demonstrates that the painter’s “abstract” images were either underpaintings that were never subsequently overworked, or studies for highly-representational images that derived from them. In any case, throughout his life the painter had undoubtedly been a representationalist, so why would he have developed into an opposite kind of artist in his later years? Given his writings, it appears far more likely that in his late works Turner simplified his shapes and raised the pitch of his light to a blazing level in order to project an ideal, platonic world of form and feeling. The arrival at such a realm through art had certainly been advocated by the theorist on painting who most powerfully influenced Turner throughout his life, namely Sir Joshua Reynolds. And that move onto some higher and more profoundly true reality than the one we occupy was surely what Turner the visionary was attempting to depict as he neared his end, not the emptying out of reality into meaningless abstraction.

Ultimately these widespread misapprehensions do not matter, for we each take from a work of art just what we need from it; such is its utility. The world in which we now live understandably forces us to seek beauty in order to offset all the ugliness that increasingly surrounds us. Turner provided that loveliness in abundance. He also furnished us with so much more: the fearsome power of nature, its ineffable peace, its immense grandeur, its underlying behavioural constants and, just as much, all the doings of man. In these pages alone the latter includes trading, carting, sailing, whaling, imprisoning, electing, gawping, scurrying, celebrating, bickering, squabbling, building, destroying, fighting, suffering, drowning, dying and mourning. Here was a painter who stood firmly within the modern industrial epoch in which we now all live and still perceive the last vestiges of the pre-industrial world that lingered all around him. Among many other things he made it his business to capture both the old world order and the brave new world, and to do so with enormous invention and finesse. That is surely one of the reasons we so treasure his works and why we will probably always do so. Turner pointed towards the past, the present and the future. In that sense he was truly timeless.

J.W. Archer, J.M.W.Turner’ssecond home at 26 Maiden Lane,Covent Garden, 1852, watercolour, The British Museum,

London, U.K. The Turner family moved here from

the artist’s birthplace across the road in 1776.

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’sChapel, with part of Thomas-à-Becket’sCrown, Canterbury Cathedral of 1794, with a brilliantly-keyed 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 the English national holiday, 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 and barber. 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 1783. 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 1788 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 1789 Turner was back in London and working under various architects or architectural topographers. They included Thomas Malton, the younger (1748-1804) whose influence on his work is discernible around this time.

On 11 December 1789 the first President of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), presided over a committee that admitted Turner to its Schools. 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.

At the 1792 Royal Academy Exhibition Turner 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. Moreover, 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.

J.W. Archer, Attic inTurner’shouse in Maiden Lane,Covent Garden, said to have been Turner’s first studio, 1852,

watercolour, The British Museum, London, U.K.

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 1796 the Society of Arts awarded the eighteen-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. 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 two 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’ 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.

J.M.W. Turner, Folly Bridge and Bacon’sTower, Oxford, 1787,

pen and ink with watercolour, 30.8 x 43.2 cm, Turner Bequest,

Tate Britain, London, U.K. The work is a transcription of an

image made for the Oxford Almanack by Michael Angelo Rooker.

Turner had attended the last of Reynolds’ lectures or discourses in December 1790, and from reading the rest of them he seems to have assimilated or responded to all of Reynolds’ lessons concerning the idealising 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' teachings.

In his discourses Reynolds not only set forth a comprehensive educational programme for aspiring artists; he also upheld the central idealising 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 Caernarfon Castle displayed at the Royal Academy in that year; it is discussed below, as are a particularly ingenious observance of Decorum, Pope’sVilla 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 1789 Turner began doubling or trebling the size of objects and settings he represented (such as trees, buildings, ships, hills and mountains) in order to aggrandise 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.

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 started 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’ demand that artists should be moralists, putting human affairs in a judgmental perspective. And linked to the moralism was Reynolds’ 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’sChapel, 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. Moreover, 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 Great Fall of the Riechenbach, in the valley of Hasle, 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.

J.M.W. Turner, Malmsbury Abbey, 1792,

watercolour, 54.6 x 38.7 cm, Castle Museum, Norwich, U.K.

This watercolour created a strong impression amongst the

Academicians when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1792.

J.M.W. Turner, Llandaff Cathedral, South Wales, RA 1796,

watercolour, 35.7 x 25.8 cm, The British Museum, London, U.K.

With its children dancing on graves - and thus oblivious to the

fact that one day they too will occupy such tombs - this drawing

may have been Turner’s first moral landscape.

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 rock face 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 synthesised 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 synthesising 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:

...it is necessary to mark the greater from the lesser truth: namely the larger and more liberal idea of nature from the comparatively narrow and confined; namely that which addresses itself to the imagination from that which is solely addressed to the Eye.

Yet this does not mean that Turner neglected the eye. He was an inveterate sketcher, and there are over 300 sketchbooks in the Turner Bequest, incorporating over 10,000 individual sketches. Often he would sketch a place even if he had sketched it several times before. By doing so he not only mastered the appearances of things but also honed his unusually retentive memory, which is a crucial tool for an idealising artist, inasmuch as memory sifts the essential from the inessential.

Turner’s principal method of studying appearances and still allowing himself room for imaginative manoeuvre was to sketch a view in outline, omitting any effects of weather and light, or even its human and other live inhabitants (if needed, those ancillaries could be studied separately). He would then return to the sketch at a later date, supplying many visual components of the scene mainly from memory and/or the imagination. Turner kept all his sketchbooks for later reference, and sometimes he would return to them as much as forty years after they were first used in order to obtain the factual data for an image. This practice began in the early 1790s, and it is easy to perceive how it grew directly out of the idealising admonitions of Reynolds.

Another, higher kind of idealisation grew out of Reynolds' teachings as well. From fairly early on in his career Turner came to believe that ultimately forms enjoy a metaphysical, eternal and universal existence independent of man. This apprehension first formed through the analysis of architecture. Like many before him, Turner maintained that not only is there a profound linkage between man-made architecture and natural architecture, but that a universal geometry underlies both. After the mid-1790s this belief was fuelled by a close reading of poetry, most particularly the verse of Mark Akenside, whose long poem “The Pleasures of the Imagination” states a platonic idealism with which Turner completely identified, with momentous results for his art.

In post-1807 perspective lecture manuscripts, Turner wrote of the artistic necessity of making earthly forms approximate to such “imagined species” of archetypal, platonic form. He followed many others in characterising these ultimate realities as “Ideal beauties”. From such an apprehension it was easy for him eventually to believe in the metaphysical power of light, and even – because it is the source of all earthly light and physical existence – that “The Sun is God” (as he stated shortly before his death). Due to such a viewpoint it is clear that the near-abstraction of Turner’s late images is no mere painterly device, despite many recent claims to the contrary. Instead, it resulted from an attempt to represent some higher power, if not even the divinity itself. Turner’s idealism was lifelong. Everywhere in his oeuvre, but especially in his later works, we can witness the projection of an ideal world of colour, form and feeling. Not for nothing did a writer in 1910 imagine that if Plato could have seen a Turner landscape, he would “at once have given to painting a place in his Republic”.