Turner. Eric Shanes
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connective mind he always found it easy to match times of day, light and weather-effects most appropriately to the meanings of his pictures. He also imbued many of his works with associative devices commonly encountered in poetry.
Dolbadern Castle, North Wales
1800
oil on canvas, 119.5 × 90.2 cm
Royal Academy of Arts, London
These are allusions, or subtle hints at specific meanings; puns or plays upon the similarity of appearances; similes or direct comparisons between forms; and metaphors, whereby something we see doubles for something unseen. Occasionally Turner could even string together his visual metaphors to create complex allegories. Here Turner was again following Reynolds, who in his seventh Discourse had suggested that, like poets and playwrights, painters and sculptors should use ‘figurative and metaphorical expressions’ to broaden the imaginative dimensions of their art.
In the final, 1790 Discourse attended by Turner, Reynolds had especially celebrated the grandeur of Michelangelo’s art. As early as 1794 Turner began doubling or trebling the size of objects and settings he represented (such as trees, buildings, ships, hills and mountains) in order to aggrandise them greatly.
Caernarvon Castle, North Wales
RA 1800
watercolour, 66.3 × 99.4 cm
Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London
He would continue to do so for the rest of his life, in ways that ultimately make his landscapes and seascapes seem every bit as grand as the figures of Michelangelo.
And by 1796, with a watercolour of Llandaff Cathedral, Turner also began making moral points in his works. Often he would comment upon both the brevity of human life and of our civilisations, our frequent indifference to that transience, the destructiveness of mankind, and on much else besides. To that end, and equally to expand the temporal range of his images, from 1800 onwards he started making complementary pairs of works; usually these were on identically-sized supports and created in the same medium, although not invariably so (for example, see the Dolbadern Castle and Caernarvon Castle, which are respectively an oil and a watercolour).
Sunshine on the Tamar
1800
watercolour, 21.7 × 36.7 cm
Ruskin School Collection
In these and other ways he responded keenly to Reynolds’s demand that artists should be moralists, putting human affairs in a judgemental perspective. And linked to the moralism was Reynolds’s admonition that artists should not concern themselves with arbitrary or petty human experience but instead investigate the universal truths of our existence, as they are commonly explored in the highest types of poetry and poetic drama. To further this end, Reynolds entreated artists to go beyond the emulation of mere appearances and convey what Turner himself would characterise in an 1809 book annotation as ‘the qualities and causes of things’, or the universal truths of behaviour and form.
Dutch Boats in a Gale: Fishermen Endeavouring to Put Their Fish on Board (‘The Bridgewater Seapiece’)
RA 1801
oil on canvas, 162.5 × 222 cm
Private Collection, on loan to the National Gallery, London
We shall return to Turner’s approach to the universals of human existence presently. But from the mid-1790s onwards he began to express ‘the qualities and causes of things’ in his representations of buildings, as can readily be seen in the 1794 watercolour of St Anselm’s Chapel, Canterbury. In works like this we can already detect a growing comprehension of the underlying structural dynamics of man-made edifices. Within a short time, in watercolours such as the Transept of Ewenny Priory, Glamorganshire of 1797, this insight would become complete. And because Turner believed that the underlying principles of man-made architecture derived from those of natural architecture, it was but a short step to understanding geological structures too.
Interior of Salisbury Cathedral, Looking Towards the North Transept
c. 1802–05
watercolour, 66 × 50.8 cm
Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum
Certainly, Turner made apparent the ‘qualities and causes’ of the latter types of forms by early in the following century (for example, see the rock stratification apparent in The Great Fall of the Riechenbach, in the valley of Hasle, Switzerland of 1804).
From the mid-1790s onwards we can simultaneously detect Turner’s thorough apprehension of the fundamentals of hydrodynamics. The Fishermen at Sea of 1796 demonstrates how fully the painter already understood wave-formation, reflectivity and the underlying motion of the sea. From this time onwards his depiction of the sea would become ever more masterly, soon achieving a mimetic and expressive power that is unrivalled in the history of marine painting. Undoubtedly there have been, and still are, many marine painters who have gone far beyond Turner in the degrees of photographic realism they have brought to the depiction of the sea.
South View from the Cloisters, Salisbury Cathedral
c. 1802
watercolour, 68 × 49.6 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
This is another of the set of large views of the cathedral made for Sir Richard Colt Hoare
Yet none of them has come within miles – nautical miles, naturally – of expressing the fundamental behaviour of water. By 1801, when Turner exhibited ‘The Bridgewater Seapiece’, his grasp of such dynamics was complete. By that time also the painter had simultaneously begun to master the essential dynamics of cloud motion, thereby making apparent the fundamental truths of meteorology, a comprehension he attained fully by the mid-1800s. Only his trees remained somewhat mannered during the decade following 1800. However, between 1809 and 1813 Turner gradually attained a profound understanding of the ‘qualities and causes’ of arboreal forms, and thereafter replaced a rather old-fashioned mannerism in his depictions of trunks, boughs and foliage with a greater sinuousness of line and an increased sense of the structural complexity of such forms.
Calais Pier, with French Fishermen Preparing for Sea: an English Packet Arriving
RA 1803
oil on canvas, 172 × 240 cm
Turner Bequest, National Gallery, London
By 1815 that transformation was complete, and over the following decades, in works such as Crook of Lune, looking towards Hornby Castle and the two views of Mortlake Terrace dating from 1826 and 1827, Turner’s trees would become perhaps the loveliest, most florescent and expressive natural organisms to be encountered anywhere in art.
All these various insights are manifestations of Turner’s idealism, for they subtly make evident the ideality of forms, those essentials of behaviour that determine why a building is shaped the way it is in order to stand up, why a rockface or mountain appears as it does structurally, what forces water to move as it must, what determines the way clouds are shaped and move, and what impels plants and trees to grow as they do.
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