Paintings by J.M.W. Turner
Tate Gallery Publications, 1991
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
SLIDE 1: Self-Portrait, c. 1800
1.
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in 1775 and died in 1851. Turner was
a professional artist from early youth; from about the age of twelve or thirteen he
exhibited watercolours in his father’s barber shop in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden,
selling them at prices from one to three shillings. (Three shillings would be the
equivalent of about six pounds at today’s prices.) In 1790, at the age of fifteen, Turner
exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy of Arts – a watercolour view of the
Archbishop’s Palace, Lambeth. Thereafter he exhibited regularly at the Academy
right up to the end of his life. Turner gained steady success: in 1799 he was elected an
Associate Member of the Royal Academy and a few years later in 1802 he became a
full member of the Academy at the age of 27. At that time the Royal Academy was
the dominant institution of English art and Turner had received the prestigious
accolade of full membership at the youngest possible age allowed by the rules and
with almost half a century of his career still ahead of him. Turner’s great
determination to succeed, and something of the total professional dedication and selfconfidence with which he achieved his success, can be seen in the self-portrait that he
painted about the year 1800. Here is a young artist secure in the considerable
recognition already accorded him, staring into the future with the air of someone who
knows exactly what he is doing and where he is going. The self-confidence expressed
by the mere fact of painting a portrait of himself may have been due not only to recent
election as an A.R.A. but to his recently having become the lover of a widow, Sarah
Danby, who later bore him two daughters, Evelina and Georgiana.
2.
In style this self-portrait is a tribute to the English portrait tradition of Reynolds
and also to one of Reynolds’s successors, John Opie, as well as to a major influence
on them both, Rembrandt, whose work Turner knew by this time. This practice of
measuring himself against both the greatest old masters and against relatively minor
contemporaries remained a habit with Turner all his life and reminds us that however
innovatory some of his works appeared to his contemporaries, and appear to us, his art
was deeply rooted in tradition.
3.
At his death in 1851 Turner’s estate, excluding pictures, was valued at
£140,000. The equivalent of this in today’s money would be about £5 million which
gives some indication of the extent of Turner’s success and his financial shrewdness.
4.
In his will Turner bequeathed to the Trustees of the National Gallery a
collection of his ‘finished pictures’ which he had either kept or, in some cases, bought
back from early patrons. There were a hundred of these in his studio at his death, but
his relatives challenged the will and eventually the nation received about three
hundred oil paintings and over nineteen thousand watercolours and drawings. In his
Turner’s Paintings / 2
40
45
50
55
60
65
70
75
will Turner also asked for a special gallery to be provided in which his pictures were
‘to be constantly kept deposited and preserved’. Such a gallery has now been built as
an extension of the Tate Gallery. Known as the Clore Gallery for the Turner
Collection it was built with funds generously provided by the Clore Foundation and
designed by James Stirling, one of the most famous modern British architects.
SLIDE 2: The Shipwreck, exhibited 1805
5.
After Turner’s early success had been crowned by his election as an A.R.A. in
1799, he proceeded over the next few years to consolidate his position with a dazzling
and imposing series of large oil paintings. These were dramatic sea pieces like ‘The
Shipwreck’, dramatic historical subjects such as ‘The Fifth Plague of Egypt (1800),
‘The Tenth Plague of Egypt’ (1802), and ‘The Destruction of Sodom’ (1805) and
calm, pastoral paintings of various kinds.
6.
‘The Shipwreck’ is an early example of Turner’s preoccupation with the sea in
all its moods. It is also one of the great early examples of his vision of human beings
as victims of the destructive forces of nature. In it the overcrowded lifeboat becomes
the focus of a drama in which the actual shipwreck is relegated to the background.
Turner surrounds the lifeboat with a circulating system of foaming stormy water, a
compositional structure that he was to develop later and that has become known as his
‘vortex’. In spite of the efforts of the two rescue boats we are made to feel that the
lifeboat is in dire peril of imminent sinking.
7.
Turner’s rendering of this scene is of a naturalism unprecedented in English
painting; in particular he displays a technique in which the movement and frothing of
the water is recreated in the movement of his brush and the textures of his paint. This
kind of effect was in contrast to the smooth illusionism conventionally expected at
that time and led to the first initial charges against Turner of ‘lack of finish’.
SLIDE 3: Crossing the Brook, exhibited 1815
8.
From the beginning of his career Turner had painted calm pastoral pictures of
English landscape. He had also painted essays in the manner of Claude, the great
French seventeenth-century landscape artist. Claude was much admired and collected
by English connoisseurs and was Turner’s great hero among the old masters. Claude’s
art was based on the landscape of Italy combined with elements of classical
architecture, mythology and history. Turner painted many historical and mythological
subjects in the manner of Claude but here he is taking Claude’s basic compositional
approach and making a highly personal adaptation of it to an English scene – the
Tamar valley on Devon.
9.
Claude invented a pictorial format for landscape which was so satisfactory that
it dominated landscape painting right down to the time of Turner and Constable, both
of whom embraced and then went beyond it. Basically it involved balancing groups of
trees (or buildings) in the foreground at the left and right edges of the picture; these
Turner’s Paintings / 3
80
85
90
95
100
105
110
115
act as ‘repoussoirs’ to stop you looking into the picture at the edges and guide your
gaze to the centre which then contains a carefully organised recession to a distant
horizon. Turner’s principal interest in ‘Crossing the Brook’ seems to be to recreate in
a very grand and poetic way the delicate pale light and atmosphere of an English
summer’s day. This seems to be confirmed by Turner’s comment to a friend visiting
his studio who noticed that a piece of paint had flaked off the picture: ‘What does it
matter,’ said Turner, ‘the only use of the thing is to recall the impression’.
10. The two girls are said to be Turner’s daughters Evelina and Georgina.
SLIDE 4: Petworth Park; Tillington Church in the Distance, c. 1828
11. In the autumn of 1819 Turner made his first visit to Italy where he experienced
at first hand the scenes and the qualities of light and atmosphere that he had been
imagining in his paintings in the Claudian manner.
12. On his return to London early in 1820 Turner immediately painted and exhibited
a very large view of ‘Rome, from the Vatican’ but after that the impact of Italy
appears only sporadically in his oil paintings over the years up to his second visit in
1828. However, new qualities of light and colour can be seen in two groups of English
scenes that he painted in the summers of 1827 and 1828. The first of these groups was
done at Cowes in the Isle of Wight where he stayed for the Cowes Regatta in July and
August, the second was done partly or possibly wholly at Petworth House in Sussex.
Petworth was the home of the eccentric Lord Egremont, a great art collector and an
important patron of Turner who also became something of a friend at this time.
Egremont provided Turner with a studio at Petworth and Turner is said to have spent
some of his happiest and most tranquil moments there, among other things indulging
in his hobby of fishing, in the lake. ‘Petworth Park’ shows that view from the long
terrace of the house over the park to the lake and distant church. Turner has painted it
as a sunset of great intensity and has used the flat expanse of lawn to reflect the light
from the sky and create an overall visual effect in which physical detail is submerged
in light and colour. The composition is focused on the centre of the picture and,
remarkably, Turner has reinforced this centralised and unified visual structure by
bending both the sky and the terrace to create an avoid shape. It is possible that he did
this to make the picture correspond more closely to the form of the human field of
vision.
13. The man walking towards the house with dogs running out to greet him is said
to be Lord Egremont himself.
SLIDE 5: Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus – Homer’s Odyssey, exhibited 1829
14. Turner’s second visit to Italy, from the late summer of 1828 to January 1829,
reinforced the increasing emphasis in his art on brilliant and extraordinary effects of
light and colour. On his return to England Turner painted, and exhibited at the 1829
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, this magnificent work, which his great
Turner’s Paintings / 4
120
125
130
135
140
145
150
155
160
champion, John Ruskin, called ‘the central picture in Turner’s career’. The subject is
taken from Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, the second of the two great ancient (c. 9th century
B.C.) Greek poems by Homer which were among the world’s first and greatest
adventure stories. Turner’s picture shows Ulysses (the Latin and English version of
‘Odysseus’) and his men escaping from the clutches of the one-eyed giant
Polyphemus who can just be seen raging in the mist on the mountain top behind and
above Ulysses’s ship. The story of Ulysses is in parts like this a kind of fairy tale, and
Turner has treated it in a fairy tale manner: the ships of Ulysses and his companions
are fantastically ornate and Ulysses’s own ship is accompanied by translucent sea
nymphs swimming around the bow. In the astonishing sunrise can be seen the horses
of the chariot of Apollo the sungod starting his daily drive across the heavens.
SLIDE 6: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – Italy, exhibited 1832
15. ‘Childe Harold’ is one of the grandest of the golden glowing Italian landscapes
that Turner produced at regular intervals after his second visit to Italy. The picture
does not represent any actual place; it is an intensely imagined vision of the physical
beauties of Italy, a kind of fantasy, although base on Turner’s by now profound
knowledge of the reality of the Italian scene.
16. The title refers to Lord Byron’s immense epic poem ‘Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage’. Childe Harold (Childe is an archaic title for the son of a nobleman) after
a youth spent in complete dissipation, repents and leaves England on a long
pilgrimage. He finally arrives in Italy where he is captivated by its beauty and is also
struck by the fact that Italy’s great classical past, the remnants of which can be seen in
decay all around, make its present beauty even more fascinating and moving. Turner
clearly shared this feeling; when he exhibited the picture at the Royal Academy
Summer Exhibition in 1832 he attached to it, printed in the catalogue, lines from the
section of the poem where Childe Harold broods on ‘a land which was the mightiest
in its old command/And is the loveliest, and must ever be/The master-mould of
Nature’s heavenly hand …’ He goes on to declare, in the lines which Turner actually
cited: ‘… and now, fair Italy!/Thou art the garden of the world…/Thy wreck a glory,
and thy ruin graced/With an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced’.
17. The figure in the foreground in what looks like a monk’s robes is presumably
Childe Harold.
SLIDE 7: The Sun of Venice Going to Sea, exhibited 1843
18. Turner’s first trip to Italy in 1819 included a visit to Venice. We know from
some extraordinary watercolours he did there that Venice made a deep impression on
him. Surprisingly, Turner did not make oil paintings of Venice until much later, in
1833, when he heard that one of his rivals, the painter Clarkson Stanfield, was
planning a Venetian subject for the Royal Academy Exhibition that year. Turner
quickly painted one himself, a detailed scene which he titled ‘…Canaletti Painting’ in
Turner’s Paintings / 5
165
170
175
180
185
190
195
200
tribute to the most famous painter of Venetian views. Turner then went off to Venice
for another visit and thereafter regularly painted and exhibited Venetian scenes. These
became progressively less detailed than the ‘Canaletti Painting’ and show us that what
really fascinated Turner about Venice was the fact that the reflection of the powerful
sunlight on the water of the Grand Canal and the white marble buildings that line it,
created dazzling effects of atmosphere and colour and dramatic sunrises and sunsets.
19. ‘The Sun of Venice Going to Sea’ was one of John Ruskin’s favourite of all
Turner’s paintings and shows a Venetian fishing boat at dawn sailing away from St.
Marks Place towards the open sea. Turner exhibited it with some lines of his own
poetry printed in the Royal Academy Catalogue: ‘Fair shines the morn, and soft the
zephyrs blow,/Venezia’s fisher spreads his painted sail so gay,/nor heeds the demon
that in grim repose/expects his evening prey.’ This quotation comes from an
unfinished epic poem that Turner wrote bits of all his life and titled ‘The Fallacies of
Hope’. This title reflects the pessimism that often appears in Turner’s work and in the
lines attached to ‘The Sun of Venice’ he seems to be reminding us of the dangers that
always await men who go to sea even in the most calm and beautiful conditions.
SLIDE 8: The Fighting ‘Téméraire’ Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken
Up, 1838, exhibited 1839
20. The ‘Téméraire’ was one of Nelson’s battleships, 1 98-gunner, and had played a
distinguished part in the great victory of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. She was
named after a French ship captured at Lagos Bay in 1759.
21. Turner was inspired to paint this picture after seeing the Téméraire being tugged
to the breaker’s yard one day in 1838. He was returning by boat from a visit to
Margate, a favourite sketching place where from 1833 he also had a close friendship
with a widow named Mrs. Booth. On the boat with Turner was the sculptor William
Frederick Woodington whose friend the sculptor Thomas Woolner left this account of
the story Woodington told him: ‘in the midst of a great blazing sunset he
[Woodington] saw the old “Téméraire” drawn along by a steam tug. The sight was so
magnificent that it struck him as being an unusually fine subject for a picture … But
he was not the only person on board who took professional notice of the splendid
sight for he saw Turner himself there, also noticing and busy making little sketches on
cards.’
22. Turner uses the blazing, and in parts blood-red, sunset to symbolise the passing
of the glory of this great ship from a past era of England’s history. The feeling that the
ship is from a different age is enhanced by the new fangled steam tug that is towing it
and this vivid contrast between the old and the new is one of the things that gives this
picture its power: it is an elegy to the passing of the age of sail. Many commentators
have also suggested that Turner, who was 63 when he painted the ‘Téméraire’, may
have intended it as a comment on his own increasing age.
Turner’s Paintings / 6
23. From the moment it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839 ‘The Fighting
Téméraire’ was hugely admired and praised and it has remained one of Turner’s most
famous paintings.
205
210
215
220
225
SLIDE 9: Norham Castle, Sunrise, c. 1845
23. The subject is Norham Castle on the River Tweed on the borders of England
and Scotland. Turner first drew and made watercolours of this scene in 1797 and
exhibited a finished watercolour of it at the Royal Academy in 1798. A number of
other versions of it date from 1802, 1820 and 1825 and Turner made new sketches on
the spot in 1831. This remarkable canvas marks the culmination of what seems to
have been a lifelong fascination with this place and is one of Turner’s greatest
paintings of light and atmosphere. In it the solid forms of the landscape and the castle
are treated purely as translucent elements of light and colour. The castle itself is
rendered in a thin glaze of blue so fluid that it has run and dripped down the canvas.
But although Turner has created some of his most atmospheric effects here, the place
is nevertheless immediately recognisable and the compositional structure is strongly
classical with the banks of the river providing balancing forms on each side with
recessions into a blue haze beyond the castle and into the pale yellow sunlight in the
sky above.
24. ‘Norham Castle’ is exceptionally well preserved for a Turner oil painting and
unlike many of his canvases probably looks very much as it did when it left his easel.
Turner would never have exhibited in public a work like this, since it would have
been considered too lacking in detail and ‘finish’ to be acceptable at the Royal
Academy. It is possibly a sketch for a more finished picture that Turner may have had
in mind, or it could be what is known as a ‘lay-in’ – the beginnings of a picture which
Turner would have worked on much more to make a finished exhibition picture.
However, it appears to most people now as a complete and satisfying work in its own
right and it is not unlikely that Turner saw it that way and that it is a painting done for
his private satisfaction.
230
235
240
SLIDE 10: 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 the
Night the Ariel Left Harwich, exhibited 1842
25. In this painting Turner developed to its fullest and most complex extent the
vortex-like swirling structure that he had given to earlier pictures of stormy seas such
as ‘The Shipwreck’ (slide 2). Here all the forces of the storm are focused on the small
and fragile looking steamship pitching in the waves in the centre of the composition.
The title makes clear that Turner based this painting on real life and much of its power
stems from the fact that he has taken a direct personal experience and found an
equally personal and original way of recreating it in painting. Turner is reported to
have said of it ‘I did not paint it to be understood but I wished to show what such a
Turner’s Paintings / 7
245
250
255
260
scene was like; I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for
hours and I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did’. The truly
unusual quality of ‘Snow Storm’ caused consternation among the art critics when it
was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1842. One famous comment was the picture
was nothing but a mass of ‘soapsuds and whitewash’. John Ruskin recorded Turner’s
response to this when Turner was at his house one day after dinner, sitting in his
armchair by the fire I heard him muttering to himself at intervals “soapsuds and
whitewash! What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea’s like? I wish
they’d been in it”’.
SLIDE 11: Peace – Burial at Sea, 1841, exhibited 1842
26. This painting is a tribute to Turner’s friend and fellow painter Sir David Wilkie
who died on shipboard in the Mediterranean and was buried at sea off Gibraltar at
8.30 in the evening of the day he died. Turner in recording this event created one of
the greatest night scenes ever painted. The picture has always been especially noted
for Turner’s use of black, which many critics complained was unrealistic. Even his
great champion John Ruskin said that it was ‘Spoiled by Turner’s endeavours to give
funereal and unnatural blackness to the sails’. Of course Turner, as always, knew
exactly what he was doing, and the black was his personal way of expressing his own
sense of grief and of conveying it to the spectator. There is a famous story that when
Turner was told about the critics’ complaints, which were especially about the
blackness of the sails of the ship, he replied ‘I only wish I had any colour to make
them blacker’.
265
270
275
280
SLIDE 12: Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, exhibited
1844
27. Turner’s interest in modern developments such as the steamship and the railway
train is an important part of his originality and relates to his fascination with the mean
of travel and with the whole experience of travel, which in those days was of course a
considerable adventure, fraught with difficulties and danger almost as a matter of
course. Great traveller that he was, it can be imagined how excited Turner must have
been by the rapid spread of the railways in the ‘railway mania’ of the 1830s and ’40s.
28. ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’ shows a scene of the Great Western Railway at
Maidenhead Bridge and was painted in the year the bridge opened. The public and
critics were absolutely stunned by the picture. The critic of the Morning Chronicle
wrote ‘Turner actually succeeds in placing a railroad engine and train before you
which are bearing down on the spectator at the rate of 50 miles an hour. How these
wonderful effects are produced it is beyond the power of man to say’.
29. Another critic wrote that ‘the world has never seen anything like this picture’.
Many others commented on how vividly Turner had created a highly realistic effect of
the train moving at speed; yet the painting has hardly any detail and Turner’s true
Turner’s Paintings / 8
285
290
achievement in this and in the snowstorm picture was to have invented a new way of
painting in which the vividness and reality of a scene is conveyed by the artist
creating in paint, not the physical detail, but the sensation of impression that you
would have of it if you were actually there. Just as Turner was on the boat in ‘Snow
Storm’, probably he based this painting on an experience he had travelling from
Devonshire by train; someone who was with him on the train reported that during a
storm Turner put his head out of the window to observe the effect, getting completely
soaked. With his eyes watering from the wind and his view blurred by the rain, it is
easy to believe that Turner has recreated in this painting something very close to what
he was seeing on that occasion. Turner symbolises the triumph of technology over
nature and the old order of rural life by the hare running in front of the train and the
ploughman in the field on the right.