The Life and Masterworks of J.M.W. Turner. Eric Shanes
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art that were so eloquently set forth in those fifteen talks. In order to understand Turner’s overall creative development, it is vital to perceive it in the context of Reynolds' teachings.
In his discourses Reynolds not only set forth a comprehensive educational programme for aspiring artists; he also upheld the central idealising 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.
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 and poetry. The images are also increasingly structured to attain the maximum degrees 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 known 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. 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; it is discussed below, as are a particularly ingenious observance of Decorum, Pope’s Villa at Twickenham of 1808 and a far better-known later example, The Fighting “Temeraire” of 1839.
Decorum is an associative method, and because Turner possessed an unusually 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. 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. (Many of these devices are explored below.) 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 1789 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. 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.
By 1796, with a watercolour of Llandaff cathedral (reproduced here), 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 discussed below, which are respectively an oil and a watercolour). In these and other ways he responded keenly to Reynolds’ demand that artists should be moralists, putting human affairs in a judgmental perspective. And linked to the moralism was Reynolds’ 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.
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 reproduced below. 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 Trancept of Ewenny Priory, Glamorganshire of 1797 (also reproduced below), this insight would become complete. Moreover, because Turner believed that the underlying principles of manmade architecture derived from those of natural architecture, it was but a short step to understanding geological structures too. 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 reproduced below).
From the mid-1790s onwards we can simultaneously detect Turner’s thorough apprehension of the fundamentals of hydrodynamics. The Fishermen at Sea of 1796 (reproduced below) 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. 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” (reproduced below), 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 fully attained 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. 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 (all three of which are reproduced below), Turner’s trees would become perhaps the loveliest, most florescent and expressive natural organisms to be encountered anywhere in art.
J. M. W. Turner, Malmsbury Abbey, 1792, watercolour, 54.6 × 38.7 cm, Castle Museum, Norwich, U. K. This watercolour created a strong impression amongst the Academicians when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1792.
J. M. W. Turner, Llandaff Cathedral, South Wales, RA 1796, watercolour, 35.7 × 25.8 cm, The British Museum, London, U. K. With its children dancing on graves – and thus oblivious to the fact that one day they too will occupy such tombs – this drawing may have been Turner’s first moral landscape.
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 rock face 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. No artist has ever matched Turner in the insight he brought to these processes. This was recognised even before his death in 1851 by some astute critics, especially John Ruskin, who in his writings extensively explored the artist’s grasp of the “truths” of architecture, geology, the sea, the sky and the other principal components of a landscape or marine picture.
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