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Joseph Mallord William Turner: (1775-1851).
"Turner's earliest works were watercolours
in the eighteenth-century tradition of the topographical 'tinted
drawing', in which a preliminary pencil outline determined the
subsequent placing of the washes of colour. However, after a group of
watercolours in which he surpassed all previous works in this style, he
evolved, together with Thomas Girtin and under the influence of J.R.
Cozens, a more flexible technique capable of conveying the most subtle
impressions and dramatic force. His first oils are sombre in colour, but
already reveal his preoccupation with contrasted effects of light and
atmospheric effects such as storms and rainbows. These earliest oils
show the predominant influences of Wright of Derby and Wilson, but it
seems to have been the paintings of de Loutherbourg that encouraged him
in his particular interest in the dramatic possibilities of natural
phenomena. |
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"By 1815, the year in which Turner exhibited
'Crossing the Brook', a scene in Devonshire treated so wholeheartedly in
the manner of Claude as to look like an Italian view, the forces driving
him towards Italy could no longer be ignored. In 1819 he went, his
main centres being Venice, Rome and Naples. The clear light and bright
colours of Italy overwhelmed him, and though his watercolours,
especially those done in Venice, show him using pure colour without the
conventional indication of shadows by dark grey or brown tones, his
output of finished pictures for the Royal Academy slackened off
considerably. However, 'Bay of Baiae', a panoramic landscape like
'Crossing the Brook' but with a much more fluid and curvilinear
composition, set the pattern for a whole series of such landscapes which
he continued to paint well into the 1830s. "The 1820s did however show a
great advance in the technique of his oil sketches. These show a much
greater range, even within individual sketches, between thin washes and
a thick impasto which is often scored into by the brush handle or
even Turner's thumbnail to suggest details of form. Those done in 1827
while visiting John Nash on the Isle of Wight are particularly
remarkable in that the sketches, seven in all, were painted on two
rolls of canvas that were only sub-divided into separate compositions
well after Turner's death. "A second visit to Rome in 1828-9 resulted in
still bolder compositions in pure colour, the sketches on coarse canvas
which seem to have been tryouts for larger compositions (one is for the
National Gallery's famous 'Ulysses deriding Polyphemus'). These too were
painted on two undivided rolls of canvas. Unlike his first visit to
Italy, when he devoted his time to pencil sketches and watercolours,
on this occasion he produced a number of oil paintings, even exhibiting
a small group in Rome, much to the mystification of most of the viewers.
The exhibits included 'Orvieto', 'Medea' and 'Regulus', but Turner
worked on them again to give them their present appearance before
exhibiting them back in London. On the same visit Turner painted 'Venus
reclining', an impression of Titian's 'Venus of Urbino' simplified into
light and colour. Turner's interest in figures had already shown itself
in a number of sometimes rather playful genre and historical scenes in
the earlier 1820s and continued in the late 1820s and earlier
1830s, partly under the influence of Rembrandt: 'Pilate washing his
Hands' shows Rembrandt's chiaroscuro treated in terms of rich colour.
"Many of Turner's figure paintings are associated with Petworth where,
particularly in the years 1828 to 1837, Turner was a frequent guest of
the third Earl of Egremont. The series culminated in
"The idyllic, dream-like landscape, often of Venice, represented one side of Turner's late style. The other was the increasingly direct expression of the destructiveness of nature, apparent particularly in some of his seapieces. The force of wind and water was conveyed both by his open, vigorous brushwork and, in many cases, by a revolving vortex-like composition. In the unexhibited pictures these forces were treated in their own right, but in most of his exhibited works (the distinction lessened in his later years) they were expressed through appropriate subjects such as the Deluge or the Angel of the Apocalypse. In some of these pictures Turner used a colour symbolism, partly deriving from Goethe's theories, as in the pair of pictures 'Shade and Darkness - the Evening of the Deluge' and 'Light and Colour - the Morning after the Deluge', exhibited in 1843 with a specific reference to Goethe. These pictures are examples of Turner's experiments with square, octagonal or circular formats in which the vortex composition found its most compact and energetic expression. "Looking at Turner's pictures of the yellow dawn or the red of sunset, one is aware, perhaps for the first time in art, of the isolation of colour in itself. Even his sea-pieces contain flecks of bright unmodulated colour that enliven their at first sight more monochromatic treatment. To extract from the continuous range of light the purity of yellow, blue or red, the hues that command and comprise the rest, required an uncompromising integrity of vision. Turner had precisely 'the disposition to abstractions, to generalizing and classification' that Reynolds regarded as the great glory of the human mind, though in a form that Reynolds would hardly have recognized. Quite early in Turner's career his pictures were already accounted 'among the vagaries of a powerful genius rather than among the representations of nature'.
"In certain watercolours he suspended
altogether the definition of a specific subject, leaving almost
everything in doubt but the positive existence of colour. Many of the
exhibited paintings began the same way; the act of defining a
particular scene was postponed until the varnishing days when the
paintings were already hanging, and then performed with astounding
brilliance. By the 1830s, as Charles Eastlake told Turner's first
biographer Walter Thornbury, none of Turner's 'exhibited pictures could
be said to be finished till he had worked on them when they were on the
walls of the Royal Academy'. Another contemporary artist described
how Turner sent in a picture to the British Institution exhibition of
1835 in a state no more finished than 'a mere dab of several colours,
and "without form and void"'; the account continues that 'Such a
magician, performing his incantations in public, was an object of
interest and attraction'. These 'dabs' of several colours must have
looked much like, say, 'Norham Castle'. Turner's process of
transformation can be seen by comparing a sketch like 'Venice with the
Salute' with an exhibited picture such as 'Dogana, San Giorgio Citella,
from the Steps of the Europa'. "Yet even in the most private,
least-finished pictures there is never that detachment from outward
reality that is now called abstract. On the contrary: he evolved with
poetic freedom the real quality of the world. In the sumptuous
style that reached its height in the mid 1830s, the material of nature
was translated into resounding chords of colour. Then, particularly in
the pictures that remained in Turner's studio, specific colour
gradually dissolved into a general medium of vision, like a bright
vapour - the hue of lucent air. There is rarely any doubt about the
things represented, but they are formed out of a common elemental
medium that washes over and through them. "Turner outgrew theatrical
extravagance but the essential sublimity of the forces that hold man in
their grip remained with him always. There is a sense of it in the
all-embracing flood of light that envelops a scene, and the
spectator too. The last subjects of storm and catastrophe make visible a
dream of peril and endurance that is full of heroic exaltation. The
elemental drama that Turner painted was both real and
imaginary."Many of Turner's most striking innovations appeared first in
his watercolours, of which a changing selection is shown at the Tate. In
the late unfinished oils like 'Norham Castle' distinctions of medium
have disappeared, delicate films of oil paint float transparently over
the white ground like washes of watercolour on paper, and the last
traces of the eighteenth-century hierarchy of artistic values have
been overthrown."
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