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The Life and Masterworks of J.M.W. Turner
The Life and Masterworks of J.M.W. Turner
The Life and Masterworks of J.M.W. Turner
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The Life and Masterworks of J.M.W. Turner

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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.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 28, 2023
ISBN9781783107346
The Life and Masterworks of J.M.W. Turner

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    The Life and Masterworks of J.M.W. Turner - Eric Shanes

    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: Throughout this book Turner’s original titles have been used for his paintings and watercolours, even where the spellings of names and words in those titles may differ from modern ones, or even from each other. Similarly, all original eighteenth or nineteenth-century spellings have been given below without the addition of the word ‘sic’. Short references to literature within the text allude to full citations in the Bibliography. The abbreviation RA stands for either Royal Academy or Royal Academician (depending on context), ARA for Associate Royal Academician and PRA for President of the Royal Academy. TB denotes works in the Turner Bequest, the vast holding of the painter’s output in the collection of Tate Britain, London. Roman Numerals appearing after TB provide the Inventory numbers of sketchbooks or individual works within that bequest.

    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

    INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS

    J.M.W. Turner, Lake of Lucerne, from the landing place at Fluelen,

    looking towards Bauen and Tell’s chapel, 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’s chapel, 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’s Tower,

    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’s Human 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’s second 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’s Chapel, with part of Thomas-à-Becket’s Crown, 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

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