Turner - Eric Shanes Mega Square

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in world art.

      In 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.

      Wolverhampton, Staffordshire

      RA 1796

      watercolour, 31.8 × 41.9 cm

      Art Gallery and Museum, Wolverhampton

      Despite the tonal delicacy with which such forms are depicted, they all seem fully concrete. Increasingly, Turner’s powers as a colourist would become stronger and ever more sophisticated, especially after his first visit to Italy in 1819. By the latter half of his life he would develop into one of the finest and most inventive colourists in European painting. That development began early in life, and initially as a result of seeing Rooker’s Battle Abbey in 1792. Turner always took what he required from other artists, and the Rooker watercolour gave him exactly what he wanted just when he needed it most.

      In 1793 the Royal Society of Arts awarded the seventeen-year-old its ‘Greater Silver Pallet’ award for landscape drawing. By now the youth was selling works easily, and he supplemented his income throughout the 1790s by giving private lessons.

      Trancept of Ewenny Priory, Glamorganshire

      RA 1797

      watercolour, 40 × 55.9 cm

      National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

      And on winter evenings between 1794 and 1797 he met with various artists – including another leading young watercolourist, Thomas Girtin (1775–1802) – at the home of Dr Thomas Monro. This physician was a consultant to King George III and a doctor specialising in mental illness who would later treat Turner’s mother. (She would subsequently die in his care in 1804.) Monro had established an unofficial artistic ‘academy’ in his house in Adelphi Terrace overlooking the Thames, and he paid Turner three shillings and sixpence per evening plus a supper of oysters to tint copies made in outline by Girtin from works by a number of artists, including Antonio Canaletto (1697–1768), Edward Dayes (1763–1804), Thomas Hearne (1744–1817) and John Robert Cozens (1752–1797), who at the time was a mental patient under the supervision of Dr Monro.

      Self-Portrait

      1798

      oil on canvas, 74.5 × 58.5 cm

      Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London

      Naturally, Turner absorbed the influence of all these painters, and the breadth of Cozens’s landscapes particularly impressed him, as it did Tom Girtin.

      Further important artistic influences upon Turner during the 1790s were Thomas Gainsborough RA (1727–1788), Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg RA (1740–1812), Henry Fuseli RA (1741–1825) and Richard Wilson RA (1713?-1782). Gainsborough’s Dutch-inspired landscapes led Turner to a liking for those self-same types of scenes, while de Loutherbourg especially influenced the way that Turner painted his figures, varying their style according to the type of image in which they appeared. Fuseli’s approach to the human form may occasionally be detected in Turner’s works as well.

      The Dormitory and Transept of Fountains Abbey – Evening

      1798

      watercolour, 45.6 × 61 cm

      York City Art Gallery

      An appreciation of the pictures of Richard Wilson, who had grafted an Italianate style onto British scenery, soon led Turner to a passionate liking for the works of Claude Gellée (known as Claude le Lorrain, 1600–1682) who had heavily influenced Wilson and who proved to be the most enduring pictorial influence upon Turner for the rest of his life. Yet from his mid-teens onwards, one overriding aesthetic influence came to shape Turner’s thinking about his art, and not surprisingly it derived from within the Royal Academy itself, albeit mostly through reading rather than from being imparted directly. This was the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

      Turner had attended the last of Reynolds’s lectures, or discourses, in December 1790, and from reading the rest of them he seems to have assimilated or responded to all of Reynolds’s lessons concerning the idealising aspirations for art that were so eloquently set forth in those fifteen talks.

      View of Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Garden

      1798

      pencil and watercolour

      51.3 × 67.8 cm, 47.4 × 64.5 cm

      Trustees of the Harewood House Trust

      In order to understand Turner’s overall creative development, it is vital to perceive it in the context of Reynolds’s teachings.

      In his discourses Reynolds not only set forth a comprehensive educational programme for aspiring artists, he also upheld the central idealizing doctrine of academic art that had evolved since the Italian Renaissance. This can validly be termed the Theory of Poetic Painting. It maintained that painting and sculpture are disciplines akin to poetry, and that their practitioners should therefore attempt to attain an equivalence to the profound humanism, mellifluity of utterance, aptness of language, measure and imagery, grandeur of scale, and moral discourse of the most exalted poetry and poetic dramas.

      Abergavenny Bridge, Monmouthshire, Clearing up after a Showery Day

      1799

      pencil and watercolour, gouache

      41.3 × 76 cm

      Trustees of the Harewood House Trust

      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 or poetry. The images are also increasingly structured to attain the maximum degree 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 familiar 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.

      Constance

      1842

      watercolour, 30.4 × 45.4 cm

      York City Art Gallery

      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; as in a particularly ingenious observance of Decorum, Pope’s Villa at Twickenham of 1808 and a far better-known later example, The Fighting ‘Téméraire’ of 1839.

      Decorum is an

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