“J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free”

Last fall, we had the opportunity to see an exhibition of paintings by J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), considered one of the best English painters ever. The exhibition, “Late Turner: Painting Set Free,” was at the Tate Britain, which has a rather large collection of Turner paintings – the result of a bequest by Turner to the British nation. From London, the exhibition traveled to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the deYoung Museum in San Francisco.

We wandered through the exhibition galleries, still fighting off jet lag and not helped one bit by the rather low lighting. The paintings were from Turner’s final years, covering roughly 1835 to his death in 1851. What struck me was how contemporary many of the paintings seemed, and one could even view some of the paintings as anticipating Impressionism.

Except they don’t. In the book that accompanied the exhibition, J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free, the editors and authors argue for understanding Turner in his own time, his final years coinciding with the early years of the Victorian period. His paintings addressed the audience of his time.

Turner in middle age

Evidence for that, for example, is the painting pictured at top. Entitled “The Fighting Temeraire,” it was painted in 1839 and depicts the retirement of a magnificent sailing ship, being led to its place in the scrap yard. The age of sail was passing; the age of steam had arrived. And no painting captured the transition better than “The Fighting Temeraire,” one of Turner’s most popular works. The audience of 1839 understood exactly the point Turner was making int hat painting, whereas today, without any of the background, we might simply see a sailing ship being moved by a tug boat.

The book, edited by David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon and Sam Smiles, is filled with information like that. And it’s information in a readable, accessible style, and not what one might expect from an exhibition book. It’s divided into two sections: five relatively short essays covering large topics, and the exhibition catalogue, divided into seven sections covering the paintings, watercolors and other items in the exhibition.

The five general essays cover Turner in his own time and later; the final years of his life; an interpretation of what was happening in his later works; the watercolors he produced during the last years of his life; and his materials and technique.

The Blue Rigi, Sunrise (1842)

At the Tate exhibition, I enjoyed the watercolors as much as the oil paintings. In fact, the work I kept coming back to was a watercolor, “The Blue Rigi,” a mountain on Lake Geneva (and I’ve posted it several times here; I like it so much I’m posting it again).

The catalog section of the book provides extensive information on each work in the exhibition, and it was only reading the book that I discovered that quite a few of the works shown at the Tate in London did not travel to the exhibitions in California.

J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free is a fine work, filled with information about and understanding of the artist, and a book that easily stands on its own. Recently rereading it, however, did take me back a year to that exhibition at the Tate.

Related:

My post on Turner the movie: http://faithfictionfriends.blogspot.com/2015/01/mr-turner-movie-thats-painting.html

My review of Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Turner: http://faithfictionfriends.blogspot.com/2012/12/peter-ackroyds-turner.html

My review of James Wilson’s The Dark Clue, a mystery based on the life of Turner http://faithfictionfriends.blogspot.com/2014/10/james-wilsons-dark-clue.html

If you’re interested in Turner, his paintings, and particularly his later years, the movie Mr. Turner was released in 2014, with actor Timothy Spall wonderfully playing the title character.

Mr. Turner: The Movie That’s a Painting

When we visited London in 2012, one of our “sights” was the Tate Britain, and one of our “sights” at the Tate Britain was the collection of paintings by J.M.W. Turner (1775 to 1851), the British artist who changed landscape painting forever. You see his paintings and you think Impressionism, you think contemporary art. You don’t think the first half of the 19^th century.

Last fall, when we returned to London, we saw a special exhibition at the Tate Britain – Late Turner: Painting Set Free, which focused on his work from the latter part of his life. It’s a wonderful exhibition, and it’s still on through Jan. 25. Of all the paintings in the show, the one that appealed to me most was the watercolor pictured above – The Blue Rigi, Sunrise.

Last night we went to see Mr. Turner, the movie by Mike Leigh (he also wrote the screenplay). The movie, starring Timothy Spall in the title role, is almost “ekphrastic” – a film (or work of art) about another work of art. In many respects, watching the movie is like watching Turner’s paintings. From what I’ve read of Turner’s life and art, Spall captures the man almost exactly. Turner was not without controversy, some of it well deserved, and Spall plays the artist very well indeed. If you’re interested in Turner, his art, or early Victorian Britain, it’s a movie to see.

Here’s the movie’s trailer:

If you’re interested in reading about Turner, four books I’d recommend are:

Turner by Michael Bockemuhl (1991, republished in 2007)

J.M.W. Turner: The Man Who Set Painting on Fire by Olivier Meslay (2005; reprinted in 2011).

Turner by Peter Ackroyd (2006) (Ackroyd has written about virtually everything else in British history, and he does well with Turner and his art.)

J.M.W.Turner: Painting Set Free (2014) – the book that accompanies the exhibition at the Tate Britain.

Painting: The Blue Rigi, Sunrise, watercolor on paper by J.M.W. Turner (1842), Tate Britain, London.

James Wilson’s “The Dark Clue”

It is 1850s Victorian Britain. The great British painter J.M.W. Turner has been dead since 1851, and a rather unscrupulous writer is researching a biography of him. Turner’s friends and supporters are alarmed, so they commission a biography as well. Artist Walter Hartright is convinced by his sister Marian Halcombe to undertake the assignment, and she will assist him in his research.

As Walter and Marian undertake their project, they soon learn that nothing about Turner is what it seems. The artist appears to have been a bundle of contradictions. As the brother and sister are pulled deeper into the story of Turner’s life, they begin to sense dark forces at work. What starts out as a biographical project becomes a descent into darkness – and possible madness.

Published in 2002, The Dark Clue is author James Wilson’s recreation of the Victorian suspense novel. In fact, the characters of Walter Hartright and Marian Halcombe are borrowed directly from what may be the classic Victorian suspense novel – The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Wilson goes beyond a simple recreation of the times of the Victorian 1850s, however. He transports the reader and almost seductively places you there, so that you experience, see, and even smell what is happening in the story, as it envelops and happens around you.

Turner (1775-1851) was an artist who transformed landscape painting. He made his name when he was quite young, exhibiting at the Royal Academy of Art on a regular basis for the rest of his life. But he wasn’t without controversy – one can see the rather large collection of his paintings at the Tate Britain (he bequeathed them to the nation at his death) and see the forerunner of Impressionism and even abstract art. As he grew older, Turner became increasingly absorbed with painting light; while his paintings seem familiar to us in the 21^st century, many of them seemed odd and puzzling to his own contemporaries.

He painted light – but his own life contained elements of darkness. And it those elements, along with the darkness of Victorian Britain, that Wilson mines in The Dark Clue. He structures the novel in three parts. The first is Walter’s perspective; the second is Marian’s; and the third is a combination of both. The Turner biography leads both characters, and especially Walter, to the brink of madness, as they journey deeper and deeper into his life – and art.

Turner as a young man, self-portrait (1799)

Wilson takes the story where a writer like Wilkie Collins might have wanted to take it but could not, given the sensibilities of the day. And it is at the point that the story becomes too dark, the main characters too personally entangled, for this to be only an impressive, perhaps even brilliant, recreation of the suspense novels of the period. It’s at that point the story becomes disappointing; it does not need the titillation that it includes. The author could have restrained himself, and his characters, but he does not. And at that point the story becomes something else, something less Victorian and more contemporary. To have remained true to Victorian sentiment he would have had to only suggest and perhaps hide.

That may have been the point; Wilson may have been attempting to do with The Dark Clue what Turner did with his paintings. Had he stopped short, he might have achieved it.

The Tate Britain currently has an exhibition of Turner paintings, Late Turner: Painting Set Free. The exhibition runs to Jan. 25, and we were fortunate enough to see it during a recent trip to London.

Painting: The Blue Rigi, Sunrise, watercolor by J.M.W.Turner, 1842, The Tate Britain.

Peter Ackroyd’s “Turner”

When we were in London in September for vacation, one of the first museums we visited was the Tate Britain. And the highlight of the Tate Britain was the collection of works by J.M.W. Turner.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 – 1851) was the foremost landscape painter of his generation, and early on he was recognized as such. Admitted to the Royal Academy of Art at a surprisingly young age, Turner had a significant impact upon his own generation, as well as the generations of artists to follow, including the Impressionists.

In Turner, author Peter Ackroyd sketches a life of the artist that provides basic information about the man, his family, his career and his major works. This is the kind of biography I wish I had had before viewing the collection at the Tate – short, straightforward and providing enough detailed information to provide some depth and understanding of collection (including how the collection came to be at the Tate).

The book, in fact, is one of Ackroyd’s “brief lives.” It is not exhaustive but then it is not meant to be. Instead, it is a chronological overview of its subject that gives an extended outline of his life and work. Other ‘brief lives” that Ackroyd has done include ones for Sir Isaac Newton and Geoffrey Chaucer. (Ackroyd knows how to do an exhaustive biography – just pick up his Charles Dickens, published in 1990.)

Don’t let the “brief life” description mislead. Ackroyd has done his homework. He pulls from letters, contemporary accounts, the writings of Turner admirer John Ruskin and others, and proceedings of the Royal Academy, among other sources.

In Turner, Ackroyd presents an artist who produced an astonishing number of works over his lifetime, one who worked almost feverishly – much like Dickens later worked in literature and magazine publishing. Turner and Dickens seem to share another important characteristic – self-awareness of their place in their respective fields and how they wanted to be known after their deaths. And both men were producing significant and important work up to the times of their deaths.

If you’re interested in a more in-depth discussion of Turner’s paintings, watercolors, engravings and other art works, then Turner: The World of Light and Color by Michael Bockemuhl is a succinct (96-page) resource. It is published by Taschen, one of the leading firms for art books and artist biographies (the one you usually find at art museums).

This would have been another good book to have read before viewing the Turner collection at the Tate, or perhaps viewing the collection, reading the book, and then visiting the collection again. It includes color reproductions of many of Turner’s major works. 

Painting: Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) - the Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis by J.M.W. Turner (1843); Tate Britain.