Foundations

In 1789, a few months shy of his fifteenth birthday, Turner enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy, then under the leadership of its first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792). Following Reynolds, who advocated studying the Old Masters, Turner discovered Claude Lorrain (ca. 1604–1682), whose work would remain a touchstone. Turner soon gained a reputation as a hard worker—a reputation he would never lose. In 1790 he exhibited a watercolor at his first Royal Academy exhibition. His ambitions, however, exceeded the medium, then not widely esteemed, and he aspired to the greater prestige associated with oil painting. He debuted as a painter in 1796 with Fishermen at Sea, the first of many marine subjects that would make him famous.

In the 1790s landscape painting was influenced by the prevailing aesthetics of the Picturesque and the Sublime. Turner's early watercolors of remote sites and ruined castles, executed during his summer tours of Britain, reflect the Picturesque. Turner, however, soon evinced a predilection for the Sublime, as articulated in Edmund Burke's influential treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). His dramatic renderings of the rugged Welsh landscape, on view in this exhibition, capture the Sublime in nature—that which produces astonishment and terror or, in Burke's words, "the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling."

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Confronting the Sublime, 1799–1815

By 1800 Turner had emerged as the rising star of his generation. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1799 and three years later became the youngest artist honored as a full Academician. Buoyed by his professional success, he opened his own gallery in 1804 on London's Harley Street, where he showed his new pictures, free from the constraints of the Academy. Already, though, there were critics who warned against what they perceived as the "indistinctness" of his style and the lack of finish.

Turner's scenes of ancient and contemporary history, on view in the exhibition, reflect his embrace of the Sublime, an aesthetic that served as a means of elevating his landscapes to the status of history painting. The swirling vortexes of wind and snow, thunderous skies, and vast mountainous terrain embody the rhetoric of the Sublime, which prized the infinite, the obscure, and the terrible in nature.

As an alternative to the Sublime mode, Turner experimented with painting landscapes outdoors, executing eighteen oil sketches on mahogany veneer and fifteen canvases of Thames subjects during a single, sustained campaign in 1805. According to a friend who observed Turner painting these pictures on his boat in the Thames, "Till you have seen these sketches you know nothing of Turner's powers." The naturalism of these works—some of the only paintings he executed directly from nature—did not appeal to all tastes; when the American-born Benjamin West (1738–1820), then president of the Royal Academy, saw a selection on view in Turner's gallery in 1807, he "was disgusted with what he found there, views on the Thames, crude blotches, nothing could be more vicious."

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Turner's Liber Studiorum

Turner was preoccupied with the Liber Studiorum (Book of Studies) from about 1807 until 1819. Inspired by Claude Lorrain's Liber Veritatis (Book of Truth), which had also been engraved, he conceived this engraved compendium of landscape imagery as a means to disseminate his art to a wider audience. Turner classified the landscapes into six categories: Architectural, Historical, Marine, Mountainous, Pastoral, and "E.P." (Elevated Pastoral). Sepia-toned watercolors served as the basis for the engravings, which were executed as a collaborative process. Turner typically etched the outline of the design while the engraver added mezzotint tone, though, in a few instances, Turner also added the tone. Publication of the series ceased in 1819, with seventy-one of the planned one hundred plates realized. Turner returned to the Liber Studiorum in the mid-1840s, reworking a number of the published engravings as oils, some of which are on view in the final gallery of the exhibition.

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Britain at War and at Peace, 1805–24

Britain's ongoing war with France—from 1793 until Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815—played a formative role in Turner's career. Foreign travel was all but prohibited (with the exception of a brief interlude in 1802, afforded by the Peace of Amiens), thereby limiting landscape imagery to indigenous subjects, as reflected in Turner's views of London and the English coast from this period. His annual tours of Britain resulted in the publication of the first installment of Picturesque Views of the Southern Coast of England (1814), a series of topographical engravings based on his watercolors.

Turner explicitly addressed the war in several major canvases. In 1805, following Admiral Nelson's defeat of the French and allied fleets at the Battle of Trafalgar, he witnessed the heroic return of Nelson's flagship, the Victory. The sketches Turner made on board the ship served as studies for his painting of the naval battle (The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory), which he exhibited as an unfinished work in his gallery in 1806, capitalizing on the topicality of his subject. King George IV commissioned another version of this great naval battle in 1822. In contrast, Turner's representation of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo (The Field of Waterloo) eschews the celebratory patriotism of his Trafalgar paintings, emphasizing instead the human cost of war on both sides.

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Turner in Britain and Italy, 1817–37

About 1817 Turner adopted a lighter palette and his colors became warmer and more intense, heralding a decade of experimentation and transition. These changes were influenced by his work in watercolor as well as by the availability of a range of new pigments, particularly shades of yellow. His canvases, infused with a golden glow, led his detractors to accuse him of being "intoxicated with colour" and having "yellow fever."

In 1819 the artist made his first trip to Italy, where, following in the footsteps of Claude Lorrain, he sketched in the Roman Campagna. Panoramic landscapes such as the Bay of Baie reflect his emulation of the Claudian ideal. In an 1811 lecture at the Royal Academy, Turner expressed his admiration for the master: "Pure as Italian air, calm, beautiful and serene springs forward the works and with them the name of Claude Lorrain." (See the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History for more information about Claude Lorrain, including images of his works.)

Turner's Italian sojourn resonated in his work throughout the 1820s, prompting a second visit, in 1828. Sunlight-infused scenes such as Regulus, conceived during his 1828 stay in Rome, recall Claude's harbor views, which Turner could have seen in Italian museums and in English private collections.

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Master of Watercolor

Turner revolutionized the medium of watercolor, dismissed in the late eighteenth century as "tinted drawing." From 1790, when he exhibited his first watercolor, Turner set out to elevate the medium's status to rival that of oil painting, producing works of unprecedented scale and technical virtuosity. He rarely made watercolors directly from nature, basing his works instead on pencil or pen sketches done outdoors. The works on view reveal his various uses of the medium, from his "colour beginnings," which established the underlying color structure of compositions, to his finished pictures, many of which were published as engravings in various series of picturesque views in Britain and abroad.

About 1800 his fellow artists began to take note of Turner's adventurous handling of the medium; as one wrote, "His completing process was marvellously rapid, for he indicated his masses and incidents, took out half-lights, scraped out high-lights and dragged, hatched and stippled until the design was finished." Despite their rapid and improvisational appearance, Turner's watercolors attest to his control of the medium. Viewed up close, they reveal minute touches and stipplings that produce a depth of color and richness that few of his contemporaries could attain.

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Ancient and Modern History

Turner's works from the 1830s reveal his iconographic range—from biblical subjects and scenes of ancient Rome to images of modern, industrial Britain and representations of current events. Turner evidenced a predilection for the Old Master practice of making paintings in pairs, or pendants, with complementary subjects that functioned didactically. Ancient Rome is the pendant to Modern Rome (The Earl of Rosebery, on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), which shows the city in ruins, the pair evoking the rise and fall of civilization—a recurrent theme in Turner's oeuvre.

The artist exhibited his first painted view of Venice in 1833, responding to the market demand for such images. His scenes of Venice draw upon a range of literary and artistic sources, including the poetry of Shakespeare and Byron and the eighteenth-century views of the city by Canaletto. Turner's Venetian subjects won him critical acclaim. By the end of the decade, however, critics increasingly derided his bravura handling; wrote one, "To speak of these works as pictures, would be an abuse of language."

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The Burning of the Houses of Parliament

On the night of October 16, 1834, the historic Palace of Westminster, the site of the Houses of Lords and Commons, was destroyed by fire. Turner was among the crowd of Londoners who thronged the Thames and its banks watching the conflagration, an embodiment of the Sublime aesthetic that informed his earlier images of biblical and mythological natural disasters. Turner recorded the event in a number of rapidly drawn pencil sketches, possibly done on the spot, as well as in a group of nine watercolors in a sketchbook. The watercolors may have been made in Turner's studio in the immediate aftermath of the fire, as he rarely worked in watercolor outdoors. They reveal the spontaneity of his technique, painting wet-into-wet, and his fascination with light effects, from the glowing flames to the reflective surface of the Thames.

Turner developed these watercolor studies into two major oil paintings, now in Philadelphia and Cleveland, which he exhibited in 1835. Significantly, in both versions Turner changed the direction of the flames so that they appear to blow over the Thames rather than back in the direction of Westminster Abbey, as they actually did—doubtless to exploit the reflective potential of the water. The critics' response was mixed as usual. "A splendid impossibility," wrote one, while another declared, "We seriously think the Academy ought, now and then, at least, to throw a wet blanket or some such damper over either this fire King or his works."

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Turner's Late Paintings

By the 1840s Turner, well into his sixties, faced mounting criticism as his treatment of forms became increasingly diffuse. His paintings, executed with a freedom of handling that ran counter to the detailed, controlled style propagated by the Royal Academy, were dismissed as "the fruits of a diseased eye and reckless hand." His embrace of color, stimulated by his readings in recent theory, notably Goethe's Theory of Color, which had been translated into English in 1840, led critics to castigate his works as "mere freaks of chromomania." Responding to the artist's detractors, the critic John Ruskin published the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843 in which he proclaimed Turner's greatness as a landscape painter; Ruskin's book played a seminal role in restoring Turner's reputation at home and in spreading his fame abroad, especially in America.

Turner's subject matter during this period reflects his ongoing interest in marine scenes. Since the 1830s he had regularly visited Margate, along the north Kent coast, painting its beaches and harbor. He enjoyed both critical and commercial success with his Venetian subjects, exhibiting nineteen oils of Venice between 1840 and 1846. In addition, a group of nine canvases from this period, in which color and subject are inextricably linked, depicts episodes from the Bible as well as recent events.

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The Late Watercolors

Turner's late watercolors reveal the same preoccupation with color and light that characterizes his mature painting style. Defending the blurred and imprecise forms of his later imagery, the artist proclaimed, "Atmosphere is my style." After 1830 he increasingly produced watercolor studies of sunsets, stormy skies, and other atmospheric effects—independent works not related to subsequent compositions. Many were made during his European travels in the 1830s and 1840s.

In 1841 Turner went to Switzerland, where he had first gone some forty years earlier. Subsequent visits over the next three years inspired at least three sets of watercolors unlike any that he had produced to date. He and his dealer marketed these pictures to a small circle of collectors, including John Ruskin and his father. To attract commissions, Turner produced a number of finished works—or "specimens," as Ruskin called them—as well as studies, or "samples," pricing each sheet at the audacious sum of 80 guineas (at the time, his oils of Venice fetched 250). These highly atmospheric watercolors—about twenty-five in all—mark the culmination of Turner's development in the medium.

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The Unfinished Paintings

When Turner died in 1851, at the age of seventy-six, he left a large number of works in his studio that constituted his bequest to the British nation—100 finished paintings, 182 unfinished oils, and more than 19,000 watercolors and drawings. Included in the Turner Bequest is a group of ten unfinished paintings, dating to the mid-1840s, which represent reworkings of the mezzotints he had created for his Liber Studiorum (1807–19). Nearly all these canvases reprise his "Elevated Pastorals," the category inspired by the idealized landscapes of Claude Lorrain. Works such as Europa and the Bull are considered Turner's homage to the artist he venerated throughout his career. Their forms suggestively rendered, suffused by light and color, these works evoke the artist's "color beginnings." It is not known why they were not finished.

This group of unfinished paintings was first exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1906. Critics marveled at this previously unknown aspect of Turner's oeuvre, the inherent abstraction of which appealed to modernist taste: "Turner in his latest development, more than any other artist who had gone before him, painted not so much the objects he saw as the light which played around them."

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Exhibition Organizers and Catalogue

This exhibition is organized by Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator in Charge, and Kathryn Calley Galitz, Assistant Curator, both of the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue edited by the Turner scholar Ian Warrell and published by the Tate.

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