The Italian Dreams of an English Master TWITTER LINKEDIN SIGN IN TO E-MAIL OR SAVE THIS PRINT REPRINTS SHARE

FERRARA, Italy — J. M. W. Turner did not see Italy until 1802, the same year he was elected to the Royal Academy at 27, then the youngest member ever.

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National Gallery of Art, Washington

Turner’s “Arrival at Venice,” 1844: Mediterranean light and strong, contrasting colors had dramatic consequences for his palette.

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Paintings by J. M. W. Turner (iht.com)

But the idea of Italy had already become an essential element in the productions of this precociously accomplished painter and draftsman while he was in his teens. His later visits to the peninsula had a radical effect on his mature work.

The lifelong impact of the Italian experience on this English artist is the subject of “Turner and Italy,” an exhibition organized by James Hamilton and featuring nearly 90 paintings and drawings. The show travels to the National Gallery in Edinburgh and the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest after its run here.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) began to imbibe Italy in his youth through English buildings influenced by Italian architecture. He grew up near Inigo Jones’s Covent Garden Piazza, and his first apprenticeships were with an architect and an architectural draftsman. Also making an impression were old-master Italian paintings, the landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Italian views by British painters, notably Richard Wilson and John Robert Cozens. All three of these artists are represented in the exhibition.

Although he was the son of a barber, Turner found patrons who would have been willing to commission him to travel to Italy to execute works for them and extend his artistic education, but the Napoleonic wars meant the continent was closed to him.

A brief pause in this long conflict, after the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, precipitated a rush of English visitors to France. Artists seized the chance to visit Paris and the Louvre, then stuffed with looted masterpieces from all over Europe, advertised over the museum’s cornice as “Les Fruits de Nos Victoires” (“The Fruits of Our Victories”).

Turner, with his patrons’ assistance, traveled to Paris and surveyed the Louvre, but he was eager to press on to Italy. On the way he discovered the Alps, the most enduring bonus of his trip. The profound effect that these mountains had on him is illustrated here by drawings and watercolors, including “St. Gotthard Pass From the Middle of the Devil’s Bridge.” The work depicts a narrow mule path snaking beneath overhanging rocks on the sheer cliff face, streaked with frozen cascades above and the dizzying chasm below, half-concealed by icy mists.

On this trip Turner made it only as far as Aosta on the southern side of the Alps, where he saw his first Roman remains on Italian soil.

Brief though this taste of Italy was, it stimulated Turner to produce further colorful scenes of cities that he was yet to visit himself, among them Rome and Naples. The renewed hostilities impeded his return to the continent for many years.

Claude Lorrain, that longtime Italian resident and Turner hero, was a primary influence on Turner’s “Liber Studiorum.” Claude had compiled a catalog of drawings of his own paintings, the “Liber Veritatis.” In 1806 Turner began a similar project, intended for publication, of etchings of his own paintings. Italian landscapes, often with architectural features, figured prominently in this collection.

But Turner went further, transforming rural Thames-side views to the west of London into Claudian Italianate pastoral scenes. “Isleworth,” a print from the “Liber Studiorum” on view in the show, depicts the still picturesque riverside village where Turner lived after his return to England. The medieval church tower, cottages and mill appear mistily in the background, but in sharp focus in the foreground Turner has conjured a circular Roman temple on the tree-lined riverbank, imbuing the scene with a distinctly Claudian atmosphere.

“Isleworth” is dated Jan. 1, 1819. In the summer of that year Turner again set out for Italy.

He had prepared for years for this opportunity: he immersed himself in classical literature, works by the Roman poets and historians, and Alexander Pope’s translations of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey”; studied travel literature, poetic and prosaic; and made a notebook (on show here) of thumbnail sketches, a dozen to a page, of the places he intended to seek out and record for himself.

Turner traversed the Alps again and took a zigzag route down the peninsula, making his first visit to Venice, passing through Bologna, Rimini and Ancona, crossing the Apennines and going through Umbria on the way to Rome and Naples.

Vesuvius erupted shortly after he returned to Rome, and he started a watercolor sketch (the unfinished work was lent by the Tate) of the volcano seen from across the bay, emitting twin plumes of decorative smoke, drifting lazily inland against a tranquil but subtly darkening sky.

Exposure to the full force of Mediterranean light and the strong, contrasting colors of Italy’s land- and seascapes had dramatic consequences for Turner’s palette; he adopted a new range of vibrant yellows, blues and reds. Nor were these applied only to his Italian paintings, which he worked up from hundreds of often minutely detailed drawings and sketches into oils and watercolors when he returned home. The palette could also be seen in new works depicting his native land.

Over the next decade, as the exhibition shows, sooty Edinburgh became a Caledonian Roman forum basking in the southern sun; Minehead in Somerset, a northern Bay of Naples. Hythe in Kent was transposed to the Gulf of Salerno, while Virginia Water, a small lake in Surrey to the west of London, took on the glassy, miasmatic air of the Venetian lagoon in midsummer.

This proved too much for some British critics, who complained that Turner’s painting was suffering from some kind of “yellow fever.” In 1828 he returned to Rome for an extended sojourn to try out the life of a resident artist. He held an exhibition of his work at a palazzo on the Quirinal Hill. Instead of wood, he used ship’s ropes painted with yellow ochre to frame the pictures. The antiquary David Laing wrote that “the people here cannot understand his style at all.”