J.M.W.TURNER

J. M. W. Turner was in his forties in 1818, when he invited a patron's oldest son to watch him paint:

He began by pouring wet paint onto the paper till it was saturated, he tore, he scratched, he scrubbed at it in a kind of frenzy and the whole thing was chaos—but gradually and as if by magic the lovely ship, with all its exquisite minutia, came into being and by luncheon time the drawing was taken down in triumph.

Was he the first action painter? Yes and no. And maybe yes again. For Turner, painting was pure impulse, but his first impulse was minute observation. And yet as consummate observer, this painter was very much part of the action.

Turner's retrospective favors titanic struggles with nature, myth, and history. Yet it includes plenty of works on paper, starting with a cathedral beneath uncanny crisp, blue skies. After that, the Met pauses here and there for a room of watercolors. (They stood in more intimate rooms off to the side at the National Gallery in Washington, and I did not see their second stop, in Dallas.)

But do these studies show increasingly abstract experiments—or rather tireless preparation? In this gradual, exquisite frenzy, an impulse could take years and carry the artist across Europe. In a related review, I ask how reviews of Turner, a hero in the age of Abstract Expressionism, now relegate him to an academic past.

Improvisation or performance?

The words of a fifteen-year-old boy convey all the fluidity and excitement of Turner's Romanticism, right down to the British punctuation. They also raise serious questions. For starters, did the event happen? The account survives only from the hand of another. It belonged to the daughter-in-law of the witness's younger brother (got all that?), herself not born until 1836. Does the manuscript get it right?

Turner thrived on paper, from a self-portrait sketch at fifteen, as commanding and baby-faced as a young William Wordsworth. Born in 1775, he exhibited in his father's barbershop window at age thirteen, enrolled in the Royal Academy school a year later, exhibited his first watercolor at the Academy at fifteen, and became a full member in record time. A portrait in oil at age nineteen shows a lean, almost anxious artist—well dressed but open collar, baby fat gone, eyes wide open, his body ready for action. And watercolor and pen stimulated his art throughout his life, from the architectural studies that first brought him fame. As for oil on paper, he hardly touched it.

Could Turner have chosen a witness too inexperienced to betray his trade secrets? Could memory and time have corrupted the rest? Could the very notions of chaos and minutiareflect a boy companion's wonder and adoration? What he described as chaos, critics calledcrude and coarse, and they did not mean it as a compliment. Could the artist have staged the whole thing to answer his critics, right down to the triumphant ending?

"Action painting" has a messy history, no doubt awaiting its historian. Cave paintings incorporated the accidents of pigment rubbed across ridged surfaces, almost like the rubbings across found objects that Max Ernst called frottage, and legends about thrown sponge marks as an impetus for painting date to ancient Greece. Abstract Expressionism depends in part on the image of artist as expressive genius and shaman that Romanticism did so much to nurture. However, Modernism changed the rules, too, and it does no good to read later prejudices into the past. Jackson Pollock had the benefit of Cubism's fragments of perception, Dada's trust in chance, Surrealism's in dreams, a fashion for Jung, the passage from American folk art to drip painting in work by Janet Sobel, and Lee Krasner to keep him sober. Anyone expecting the same from Turner will wonder at his yellow paint and historical pageantry.

One thing is certain: Turner was performing. He understood painting as a performance, of a kind that Abstract Expressionism never knew. It starts with the subject of his narrative paintings, much as for a pre-Romantic like Jean-Baptiste Greuze. When he depicts nature's cataclysmic power, Hannibal invading Italy, a pilgrim's dangerous mountain crossing, or England's triumph over Napoleon, he is creating a moral theater—and it is not entirely coincidence that I post this on an anniversary of 9/11. When he places himself within the scene, as the observer with risks of his own, he inserts himself into exactly that.

He took his sketchbooks on decades of travel. He anticipated an Impressionist's intensity of color and belief in painting on the spot. Does that sound ever so down to earth? Maybe, but he picked some wild spots. The origins of Impressionism bridged nature and culture by taking a location in between, the Paris suburbs. The Londoner bridged them instead by going to extremes. Turner treated painting as an extreme sport.

The visionary and the doer

The retrospective goes lightly on the precocious careerist and downplays his portraiture, but it gives him a very fair shake. It picks him up in his twenties and leans heavily on the Tate's collection, as it must. From there, a largely thematic arrangement does not have to play fast and loose with chronology. The artist's subject keeps changing because he goes in search of it.

Whereas Pollock appears at work in photographs and on film, Turner did not let others into his studio. Instead, he finished paintings in long "varnishing days" at the Academy, like a crowded opening today without the cheap wine. In this way, he could reserve glimpses of his process for calculated public moments—more stagecraft than improvisation. As the modern saying goes, "you had to be there," but only the artist and a chosen public had the good seats. Pollock's drips identify the painting with its process. Turner's thick, rapidly labored surfaces record his working his way out of accident and into history.

His roots in architectural painting must have made his later free style appear as a double betrayal. Already, though, he is taking liberties. In his early watercolors, pen lines connect the surrounding vegetation to bare, ruined choirs. In the dark sheen of a night seascape, moonlight carves storm clouds into another kind of cathedral vault. The same central arc turns up repeatedly in his paintings. Where the masses of landscape and human habitation have a strong asymmetry, with its own onrush into depth, nature's temple unifies and presides over the whole.

Moonlight and religious symbolism parallel those of Caspar David Friedrich, born just a year before him. When Turner takes to the Swiss Alps for the Devil's Bridge, he again has something in common with Friedrich's allegories in the wilderness. However, he goes much more lightly on the allegory and more explicitly on the observed wilderness. From the bridge crossing, one has no doubt where in the mountain pass Turner stood. His point of view also reduces Friedrich's tiny figures to a more fragile humanity than the German's monks and moon watchers. Where the German artist creates outsize heroes, Turner subordinates his cast of characters to the painter's eye.

Before long, Turner is burnishing his academic credentials with classical scenes. Modern eyes may prefer the humbler realities of another great English Romantic, John Constable. With his river coursing through locks and his cloud studies, Constable ties himself to a time and place—one, unlike Turner's London or the Great Western Railway of his Rain, Steam, Speed, becoming safely a part of the past. Still, as student of architecture and painting, Turner does his own tour of England, and Constable's Salisbury Cathedral reflects the same active observer of a spiritualized reality. They connect the artist as visionary to his investment in his vision.

These artists make Romanticism a matter of more than dramatic subjects and distant longings. Like the Enlightenment painting before them, they also reflected a new empiricism, but not only that. For J.-S. Chardin, ordinary things had unprecedented solidity and unprecedented transience—a cat leaping across a ledge, an ashen smear of oil on a ceramic jug. The Romantic imagination, in contrast, is very much part of the construction of its vision. Uniquely for Turner, the active imagination takes some serious physical activity as well. Turner can show Hannibal crossing the Alps only because he has, too.

Catastrophe as siren

Luckily for the artist, his fellow mortals quickly conspired with his vision. Just when Turner was seeking the scale of history painting, Europe staged the Napoleonic wars, with his nation as the victors. Just when he looked to the sky for an uncanny mix of nature and culture, his native city obliged: sunlight dissolved in the same polluted, smog-drenched skies that would soon appall and delight Charles Dickens. Just when he needed still brighter lights and a more skeptical view of the course of empire, he plopped down in Venice. Just when he got old enough for a little fire and brimstone, the houses of Parliament caught fire.

Even at his slickest, Turner followed the action each step of the way. He saw Admiral Lord Nelson's victory and death at Trafalgar, and he painted the sea battle "as seen from the mizzen starboard shrouds of the Victory." Crossing the Channel, he visited the field of battle at Waterloo. He was in London for the burning of Parliament. Raised in Covent Garden, he might have called the conflagration home.

None of this prevents him from aspiring to the traditions of history painting—or just making things up. One can see him as halfway between Constable's country labor and Friedrich's spiritual gloss. That simply makes him a Romantic, but it may have something to do with his personality and aspirations. He had a working-class upbringing and an unstable, possibly psychotic mother. When, late in life, he paints castles and estates as strangely isolated and drenched in color, he could be lifting them above his settings. He could also be conveying his own alienation and proximity to suffering.

One can see past the heroics even in battle. Limbs appear limp, and eyes stare out. The paintings of Carthage and of modern Venice also prefigure The Course of Empire, as seen in American Romanticism. These things, like the abstraction and excesses, added to the hostile criticism: why could he not paint people and landscapes with a little more dignity and coherence? Why drown them in industrial pollution and a hostile sun?

The same extravagance endeared him to his greatest champion, John Ruskin. It also brought him new defenders in the twentieth century. In the light of abstraction or the all-over haze of late Claude Monet and his Water Lilies, his paintings display a steady progression to saturated canvases left unfinished at his death in 1851—some after nearly a decade of effort. Horses in a near-empty landscape seem to have melted in a hot sun and a final cataclysm. For all that, the prosaic moments keep appearing, lending the late work its richest colors and most contemporary feel. Black returns in paintings of commercial shipping, and smoke hangs down with the mournful limpness of fallen soldiers.

Even at the end, however, his long work process and hints of allegory distance him from present-day norms. In one account, he had himself strapped to a mast to observe a storm. The story, perhaps itself a legend, turns him into Odysseus, but with nature's worst and most prosaic catastrophe as his sirens. Criticism today distrusts an academic style, allegory, representation, self-expression, masculine gesture, formal abstraction, and self-effacement. Contemporary art also wallows in them all. Turner scrambles them up and defines the mad scramble as Romanticism.

TURNER

Rising from a modest background, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) became the leading British artist of his era. Over the course of six decades, he transformed the genre of landscape through works that proclaimed him heir to the old masters even while they heralded a new and visionary direction in 19th-century painting. Known for his technical brilliance and startling use of light and color, he incorporated learned references to literature, mythology, and historical events in his pictures. His commitment to the idea that watercolor equaled oil painting in complexity and expressive power raised the standard for others working in the medium. And his exquisitely rendered works, heralded for their virtuosity, inspired generations of artists.

This exhibition is the most comprehensive survey of Turner's work ever presented in the United States. More than 145 paintings and watercolors reveal the astonishing talent and imagination of this artist—whom Alfred, Lord Tennyson called "The Shakespeare of landscape."

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British Picturesque Landscapes

The British aristocracy's love of the countryside will be revealed in British Picturesque Landscapes, a focus installation of engravings and colored prints of scenic Great Britain from late 18th- and early 19th-century books, including three engravings of paintings by Turner. Exceptional images from 19 books will be on view as well.

The exhibition will be divided into four display cases. The first will contain engravings after works by Turner, including one from The Turner Gallery: A Series of One Hundred and Twenty Engravings from the Works of the Late J.M.W. Turner (1878). The second case will present travel books authored by William Gilpin (1724–1804), featuring bucolic country scenes of the Scottish Highlands, of Wales, and along the River Wye.

The third case will include charming landscapes and seascapes from books by Samuel Ireland (d. 1800), Louis Simond (1767–1831), and Rudolph Ackermann (1764–1834). The final case will feature prints of country manors that show how man intervened in the landscape to create idealized settings. Two books in the case present views of South Winfield Manor and Kenilworth. Also on view will be two books by John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843), with before-and-after engravings used by this landscape architect to promote his designs. The Loudon volumes were part of a recent acquisition from the Leo and Grega Daly Fund for Architectural Books.

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TURNER

WILLIAM TURNER AND THE "YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER"
In April 1815, the eruptions of Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, ejected to the atmosphere aproximately 100 cubic kms. of ashes, being the most violent eruption in modern times. The following year, 1816, became known as "The year without a summer" due to the extreme weather conditions and the persistent fogs caused by the eruption. Some historians believe that this altered climate could be an inspiration for many works by Joseph Mallord WilliamTurner

Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, with the spectacular crater caused by the 1815 eruption (photo: NASA)

Joseph Mallord William Turner: Ulysses deriding Polyphemus - Homer's Odyssey" (1829, London, Tate Gallery)

Joseph Mallord William Turner: Norham Castle: sunrise" (c.1835-40, London , Tate Gallery)

Joseph Mallord William Turner: "The fire of the House of Lords and the Commons of October 16th, 1834", 1835. Cleveland Museum of Art

Joseph Mallord William Turner: "Venice from the portal of Santa Maria della Salute " (1835, New York , Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Joseph Mallord William Turner: "The fighting Teméraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up" (1839, London , National Gallery)

Joseph Mallord William Turner: Peace - Burial at sea" (1842, London , Tate Gallery)

Joseph Mallord William Turner: "Rain, steam and speed". 1844 - Londres, National Gallery

Joseph Mallord William Turner: "Sunrise with sea monsters". c.1845 - London, Tate Gallery

Joseph Mallord William Turner: Yacht approaching the coast" (c.1845-50, London, Tate Gallery)

MASTER OF ATMOSPHERES - William Turner

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The life and works of Joseph Mallord William Turner

by G. Fernández - theartwolf.com

The popular confusion between genius and madness is clearer than ever in the biography of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851). Whereas he had been at his beginnings an academic painter, Turner was slowly but unstoppably evolving towards a free, atmospheric style, sometimes even outlining the abstraction, which was misunderstood and rejected by the same critics who had admired him for decades. The apparent chaos that filled his last works was criticized for being considered the work of a lunatic man. It is said that even Queen Victoria refused to bestow a knighthood on him - an honour given to many less important painters- because she considered that Mister Turner was simply mad.
In a certain sense, it was quite easy to label Turner as "mad", considering his maternal precedent: his mother spent the last 4 years of her life confined in a mental hospital. In addition, William Turner himself spent his last years in Chelsea, with a woman named Sophia Boot, pretending to be a retired Admiral. But, in fact, the "chaos" that can be found in Turner's late works is actually the result of a complex artistic evolution in which the painter is several decades ahead of any other artist of his generation. Therefore, the lack of understanding which Turner suffered in his life should not be surprising.
It is told that, during an exhibition at the Royal Academy, a piece of canvas from a Turner painting fell to the ground, and the painter played down the importance of the incident arguing that "the only important thing is making an impression". It is easy to imagine the surprise that this idea could have caused in the serious Academy. Writer John Ruskin -who was a close friend of the painter- told that during an exhibition, once again, at the Academy, an Art critic reproached Turner that he had not painted the ship's portholes in one of his paintings. Turner explained the critic that, at the moment in which the picture was painted, the ships were against the light and, therefore, the portholes were not visible. Annoyed, the critic argued: "yes, but you know that the ships have portholes", to which Turner replied:"Yes, but I paint what I see, not what I know". Indeed, the direct contemplation of objects and atmospheric phenomena had a pivotal importance in the genesis of his paintings. But -as Ruskin pointed- the result of this direct contemplation was not an exact, precise representation of the observed thing, but a subjective impression that those objects or phenomena caused in the painter's mind
FIRST YEARS - FROM THE ACADEMY TO CARTHAGE
A precocious painter and a brilliant student, Joseph Mallord William Turner started his studies at the Royal Academy of London, with masters like Sir Joshua Reynolds or Paul Sandby. From the beginning, his paintings and watercolours were admired and received positive critics. For this reason, Turner soon found himself in an enviable economic situation, which allowed him to make numerous trips in England and Wales, taking numerous sketches of places and monuments, just before visiting France and Switzerland, which allowed him to increase his pictorial universe studying masterworks by great old masters like Rembrandt, Albert Cuyp, and, of course, Claude Lorrain. The influence of the French master is easily identifiable in Turner's works from this period, such as his scenes of "The Plagues of Egypt" (1800) and the later"Sun rising through vapour" (1807, National Gallery of London)
It is told that one day Turner was at the home of his patron Walter Fawkes in Farnley Hall, Yorkshire , when a sudden thunderstorm interrupted the quiet afternoon. Quickly, Turner began to make sketches of the clouds and the hard rain, telling Fawkes: "In two years, you will see these sketches transformed into a painting called 'Hannibal crossing the Alps'". In 1812, Turner displayed at the Royal Academy his most ambitious early work, the epic "Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps" (1812, London, Tate Gallery)
The success of this painting at the Royal Academy encouraged Turner to paint other historical scenes of similar thematic, such as the "Dido building Carthage" (1815, London, National Gallery) or "The decline of the Carthaginian empire"(1817, London, Tate Gallery)
A BRITON IN ROME
Turner's fame was growing quickly. "Turner would find in Rome new and suitable material for his genius", Sir Thomas Lawrence wrote in 1819. Finally, in August of that same year, Turner arrived in Italy.
Turner's open and perceptive mind found there a new world of colours, lights and atmospheres, which he transferred to the canvases after his return to England. He visited Torino, Milano, Venice and Naples; and studied works by great masters like Titian, Tintoretto or Raphael. He also met contemporary artists such as Antonio Canova. Turner returned to England in February 1820. The images and memories from Italy would mark his pictorial production in the following years, as we can see in works like "The Roman Forum" (1826, London, Tate Gallery) or his personal tribute to Raphael, the "Rome, seen from the Vatican, Raphael with Fornarina prepares the pictures for the decoration of the lodges" painted in the same year of his return to England (London, Tate Gallery).
MATURITY - ULYSSES DERIDING POLYPHEMUS
Turner made another trip to Italy in 1828, making numerous outdoor sketches that would have their reflection in a sensational picture painted in England the following year: the " Ulysses deriding Polyphemus - Homer's Odyssey" (1829, London, Tate Gallery) was described by Ruskin as "the central painting in Turner's artistic production", and, in a certain sense, the description can be very valid. In effect, in the " Ulysses ", the mythological subject (Ulysses defeated the Polyphemus -a Cyclops- putting out his giant's eye with a burning stake) is little more than an excuse to represent the furious strength of the nature. The picture surprised for its shining colours, and received more negative than positive critics in the Royal Academy exhibition in 1829.
In the 1830s, Turner's style was becoming more and free, with the use of a predominantly clear palette. The culmination of all this process is the sublime " Norham Castle : sunrise " (c.1835-40, London , Tate Gallery), in where almost all recognizable form is diluted by the omnipresent sunrise's light. With its technical perfection and its extraordinarily clear palette, the painting resembles more to a watercolour than to a painting on canvas.
The fire of the House of Lords and Commons of October 1834 allowed Turner to created a series of sketches that would derive in two paintings about this incident (now in Cleveland and Philadelphia Museums) in which Turner is specially interested in the reflected image of the fire in the Thames river, as a contrast between the fire and the water. These views impressed Monet when visiting London several decades later, and inspired him to create a series of paintings depicting the Houses of Parliament.
During these years, Turner made three trips to Venice , being the last of them - in 1840 - the most prolific of his entire career. In the Italian city Turner painted some of his oil and watercolour masterpieces. In " Venice from the portal of Santa Maria della Salute " (1835, New York , Metropolitan Museum of Art) Turner slightly varies the original landscape (he adds a nonexistent building to the composition) to reflect with more emphasis the Venetian beauty.
In April 2006, one of these Venetians views painted by Turner, "Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio", an oil on canvas painted during his last trip to Venice, was auctioned in Christie's New York for more than $35 million.
FIGHTING TEMERITY - THE TRIBUTES IN THE SEA
Although William Turner was more -much more- than a simple seascape painter, it would be absurd not to recognize that many of his greatest achievements were obtained in the depiction of the sea and the marine elements. In these subjects, his greatest masterpiece is with no doubt "The fighting Teméraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up"(1839, London, National Gallery). Deliberately, and without being a false move, the "dissolution of forms" effect appreciable in previous paintings (like the already mentioned"Norham Castle") is not so evident here, allowing a better understanding of the the painting's narrative.
Audacious and technically perfect, Turner's masterpiece is an unusual representation of a royal ship, normally depicted in its maximum splendour as Fitz Hugh Lane did in his seascapes (see number 10), but here Turner tributed the brave Temeraire depicting its last trip before being scrapped. This supreme work was elected as the best painting in England in a poll organized by the National Gallery of London in 2005. Certainly, very few paintings can be compared with this. One of them is "Peace - Burial at sea" (1842, London , Tate Gallery), created to the memory of painter Sir David Wilkie.
RAIN, STEAM AND SPEED
The "Ulysses deriding Polyphemus" can be considered the "pivotal picture" of Turner's oeuvre. But the culmination of it, the pinnacle of Turner's powers, and one of the greatest masterpieces of the history of Art, is, with no doubt, "Rain, steam and speed - The Great Western Railway" (1844, London , National Gallery)
The picture is a sensational conclusion to Turner's investigations about the representation of light and atmospheric effects in painting, which were developed during his time as professor at the Royal Academy, where Turner learned Newton and Goethe's theories about light and colour. In this painting, the authentic protagonist, even ahead of the dynamical locomotive, is the changing English atmosphere, an effect increased by the steam caused by the powerful machinery. Many art critics -and later many impressionist painters- felt a deep fascination for this quick locomotive. When this painting was first exhibited in 1844, a critic wrote:“a train advances towards you, a train that really moves at 50 miles per hour, and that the reader would do well to see before it leaves the picture...”.
VISION AND HALLUCINATION - THE LAST YEARS
We have already commented that the "dissolution of forms"appreciable many of Turner's last works was interpreted by numerous critics as the beginning of a dementia. Even Ruskin was quite disturbed by these works by Turner, who was sometimes forced to place nails in the frames to indicate the top and the bottom of the canvas.
"Sunrise with sea monsters" (1845, London, Tate Gallery) is one of the best examples of this last period of his career. The forms of the sea monsters are hardly recognizable in the middle of the omnipresent marine atmosphere. The almost divine quality of the light reflects Turner's theory of considering the Sun as the centre of all life. Something similar happens in "Yacht approaching the coast" (c.1845-50, London, Tate Gallery)
Seriously ill, in October 1851, Turner was forced to stop any artistic activity. On December 19th, 1851, Joseph Mallord William Turner passed away in his house in Chelsea, London, and he was buried in Saint Paul's Cathedral. The main core of his works can be admired today at the Clore Gallery, a wing of the Tate Gallery specially built to exhibit the works of the greatest English painter of all time.

J.M.W.TURNER

"The Slave Ship" formally "Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on"^[1] is a painting by the British artist J. M. W. Turner, first exhibited in 1840. Measuring 35 3/4 x 48 1/4 in. in oil on canvas, it is now in theMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass. In this classic example of a Romantic maritime painting, Turner depicts a ship, visible in the background, sailing through a tumultuous sea of churning water and leaving scattered human forms floating in its wake.

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[edit]History

J. M. W. Turner was inspired to paint “The Slave Ship” in 1840 after reading The History and Abolition of the Slave Trade^[2]by Thomas Clarkson. In 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong had ordered 133 slaves to be thrown overboard so that insurance payments could be collected. This event probably inspired Turner to create his landscape and to choose to coincide its exhibition with a meeting of the British Anti-Slavery Society. Although slavery had been outlawed in the British Empire since 1833, Turner and many other abolitionists believed that slavery should be outlawed around the world. Turner thus exhibited his painting during the anti-slavery conference, intending for Prince Albert, who was speaking at the event, to see it and be moved to increase British anti-slavery efforts.^{[citation needed]} Placed next to the painting were lines from Turner’s own untitled poem, written in 1812:

“Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;

Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds

Declare the Typhon's coming.

Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard

The dead and dying - ne'er heed their chains

Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!

Where is thy market now?"

While the impact of the painting cannot be accurately measured, it may have contributed to the passing of an 1843 law in which the British Empire pledged to more effectively suppress slavery and the slave trade. Once that law had been passed, a cascade of anti-slavery laws from many other Atlantic countries were passed, dramatically decreasing the amount of slavery in the nineteenth century.^{[citation needed]}

[edit]Description

The first impression that the painting creates is of an enormous deep-red sunset over a stormy sea, an indication of an approaching typhoon.^[3] Upon closer inspection one can discern a ship sailing off into the distance. The masts of the ship are red, matching the blood-red colour of the sky and the sickly copper colour of the water, which serves to blur the lines between various objects in the painting.^[2] The ship’s sails are also not unfurled, revealing that the ship is preparing for the typhoon. In the foreground can be seen a number of bodies floating in the water; their dark skin and chained hands and feet indicate that they are slaves, thrown overboard from the ship. Looking even more carefully, one can see fish and sea monsters swimming in the water, possibly preparing to eat the slaves, and sea gulls circling overhead above the chaos.

Consistent with Turner’s emphasis on colour in many of his other works, the painting’s central focus is on the interactions of various colours. Few defined brush strokes appear in the painting, and objects, colours, and figures become indistinct. Rather, objects are defined by their colours in the painting, and some objects (like the bodies of the slaves and the incoming storm) have no real border at all, being solely defined by the contrast with the pigments around them. The most prominent colours are the red of the sunset which encroaches into the water and ship as well, and the maroon of the bodies and hands of the slaves.^[2]

[edit]Style and interpretation

Turner’s emphasis on colour rather than design is typical of many Romantic works of the time. The indistinct shapes and the pervasiveness of the sunset’s blood-red colour serve to convey a focus on nature and illustrate the idea that nature is superior to man. Other colours in the painting, such as the cool blue of the ocean and the black caps of the water, bring the ocean’s hues to life and give the viewer a sense of the true emotions of the natural world. The fact that the figures in the painting are depicted as minuscule and that even the ship is shunted to the background in favour of the water and the sun further serve to decrease the emphasis on humanity and transfer it to nature.^[2]

By placing the emphasis on nature rather than on figures or objects, Turner evokes the concept of the “sublime”, coined by Edmund Burke. The idea of the sublime is of the utter powerlessness and terror of humanity in the face of nature; by dramatizing the strength of the waves and sun, Turner uses “The Slave Ship” to perfectly encapsulate Burke’s definition of the term. Turner’s decision to paint the work with a series of quick, frenzied brush strokes rather than carefully defined lines adds to the intensity of the painting, serving to make the viewer feel even more overwhelmed.^[2] Though the painting’s size is relatively small compared to many Romantic landscape paintings, it still captivates the viewer in arguably a more powerful way.

Some viewers have argued that “The Slave Ship” actually represents Turner’s reaction to the Industrial Revolution. The painting might be viewed as an allegory against the exploitation of slaves and other human labour in favour of machines and economic advancement, represented by the coming storm engulfing the cruel captain. However, the storm could also be viewed as a representation of nature’s dominance over man and of the ultimate futility in trying to industrialize and advance society.^[2]

[edit]Critics

Mark Twain said, in "A Tramp Abroad," Volume 1, Chapter XXIV,^[4]: "What a red rag is to a bull, Turner's "Slave Ship" was to me, before I studied art. Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point where that picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure as it used to throw me into one of rage, last year, when I was ignorant. His cultivation enables him—and me, now—to see water in that glaring yellow mud, and natural effects in those lurid explosions of mixed smoke and flame, and crimson sunset glories; it reconciles him — and me, now — to the floating of iron cable-chains and other unfloatable things; it reconciles us to fishes swimming around on top of the mud — I mean the water. The most of the picture is a manifest impossibility — that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can enable a man to find truth in a lie. But it enabled Mr. Ruskin to do it, and it has enabled me to do it, and I am thankful for it. A Boston newspaper reporter went and took a look at the Slave Ship floundering about in that fierce conflagration of reds and yellows, and said it reminded him of a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes. In my then uneducated state, that went home to my non-cultivation, and I thought here is a man with an unobstructed eye. Mr. Ruskin would have said: This person is an ass. That is what I would say, now."

The painting was the subject of an extended poetic sequence or verse novel by David Dabydeen, Turner (1994; reissued 2002).

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TURNER

Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) - The Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, which was exhibited in 1843,^[1] is an oil painting by the English painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (c.1775–1851).

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[edit]Description

Displayed during the latter years of J.M.W. Turners career, this painting depicts a deluge scene where the natural effects of light and weather (the atmosphere) play a crucial role on Turner's concept of vision. The deluge being referred to in the title is the representation of the great flood story told in the Book of Genesis. As suggested by its title, the painting also acknowledgesMoses,known as the author of the book of Genesis found in the Old Testament of the Bible.^[2] In this painting the role of man is portrayed as passive through his inability to control nature, which is beautiful to the eye yet has the power to destroy and recreate life. This piece also illustrates Turner's belief that God is the one in charge as it is He who creates the flood, allows Noah to survive, and inspired Moses to write the Book of Genesis. Genesis, in this case leads back to the creation of man, light, and the water which light is being reflected on.^[3]

[edit]Style

For most of his career Turner, whose works are predominantly subjective, was recognized for his watercolor and oil paintings that reflected landscape images and scenes of natural entities such as the weather, the ocean, the effect of light, and vision. Through the blurring of images, Turner attempts to justify the belief that the eye is always trying to form an image as it tries to recreate nature. Traditionally, colour is used as a type of accessory to form, but Turner's attraction to light and colour allows colour to take the place of form.^[4] The main colors used by Turner were red, yellow, and blue,^[3] which is discussed more in depth in relation to other works that influenced that of Turner. His work also illustrates his relationship to the Romantic Movement and position as the precursor of the impressionist movement.

[edit]Influence

As expressed in the title of the painting, J.M.W. Turner found interest in Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe's book, Theory of Colours also known as Zur Farbenlehre, published in 1810.^[5]

[edit]Goethe's Theory

Turner absorbed Goethe’s theory of light and darkness and depicted their relationship in a number of his paintings, including Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) - the Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis. According to this theory,the creation of color is dependent on the distribution of dark and light reflecting through a transparent object.^[5] Turner uses main concepts from Goethe’s theory, which is a rejection of Newton’s seven Color Theory, and expresses the belief that every color was an individualized combination of light and darkness. Newton's reasoning in his theory of light and color was, in the words of Michael Duck, too simplistic for Goethe. As a result Goethe found his own form of vision in regards to the physiological aspects of the concept of color.^[6] As a result, Goethe claims that there is an infinite amount of color variation, and through his paintings Turner attempts to reflect this theory.^[5] Turner also responds to the plus and minus concepts that Goethe created to address both emotions and the eye. His main focus was the after image that is left on the retina after seeing an image. Through this after image the plus addresses the colors red and yellow which is intended to evoke a buoyant feelings, while the color blue contrasts such as it creates the emotion of melancholy and desolation.^[3] According to Goethe's concept, yellow undergoes a transition of light becoming darker when light reaches its peak, just as the sun shines in the sky, it develops to a white light that is colorless. But the light deepens and evolves the yellow into an orange and then finally to a ruby red hue.^[5] Turner illustrates the process of yellow transitioning into phases of light by showing how, as the viewer moves away from the center, the edges get darker.

[edit]Symbolism

The yellowing coloring of the painting is a reference to Goethe’s Theory of Colour, which explains the color yellow as being the first color transmitted from light. ^[7] The form of the painting is circular, symbolizing the construction of the human eye, changing the focus of a typical linear splitting of space to a more subjective portrayal. The color yellow is typically optimistic, but Turner captures the negativity of yellow by attaching the color to a light that is subject to change. The morning sun aspect of the color is something transient.^[5]

[edit]Companion piece

• Turner's paired piece titled Shade and Darkness - The Evening of the Deluge was also exhibited in 1843. In this piece as well as The Morning After the Deluge, Turner makes no attempt to mirror the scene of the flood in its naturality.^[3]
• Fallacies of Hope is a poem that Turner supposedly wrote to parallel the two paintings.^[5]

[edit]Acknowledgement

• Shown in the London Royal Academy 1843.^[5]
• The Tate Gallery (London), also known as the Tate Britain, housed many works of J.M.W. Turner including this particular piece.

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J.M.W.TURNER

Joseph Mallord William Turner (Covent Garden, London, 23 April 1775^[1] – Chelsea, London, 19 December 1851) was an English painterand artist. He was one of the greatest artists of landscape painting, with a great mastery of light and colour.^[2]

His father was a maker of wigs. His mother was ill with mental problems, and the young Turner was sent to live with his uncle in Brentford, where he first started to paint.

Turner became a student at the Royal Academy of Art school in London when he was 14 years old. He was accepted into the Academy a year later. He had a watercolour painting in 1790 in the Academy's important art show. He had only been studying for a year. In 1802, at the age of only 28, he was elected a member of the Royal Academy, and later became its Professor of Perspective.

In 1802, Turner travelled around Europe, visiting France and Switzerland. He also went to the Louvre in Paris. During his life, he often travelled across Europe, visiting Venice in Italy several times. As his personal style developed, he began to produce paintings that were generalised or exaggerated in form and colour, rather than realistic or detailed. These caused much argument as to their artistic value, but nowadays are his best loved works. On his death, he left 300 oils and 20,000 watercolours to the British nation. Some of his watercolours are the most abstract or generalised of his paintings.

Turner never married, although he had two children with his mistress Sarah Danby. For much of his life, he lived with his father, who helped him in his studio until he died in 1829.

In his early career, Turner was influenced by the painters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, who painted "historical" landscapes.

Turner became interested in natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea. His paintings revolve around the light of the sun, shown in infinite variety. His work showed some of the ideas of the impressionists decades before they arrived on the scene. Monet, in particular, studied Turner's methods.

His most famous paintings include The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up. Often called just The Fighting Temeraire, this is a picture of a famous warship that was used in the Battle of Trafalgar. Other pictures include Rain, Steam and Speed, which shows a steam train crossing a bridge, and Snowstorm which shows a steamship in a snowstorm trying to get into a harbour. In order to get the right feeling into this painting, he had himself tied to a ship's mast during a storm, so that he could see what it was like. Some of his most famous paintings show the roughness of nature, with bleak landscapes and violent storms.

But also there is beauty and a sense of calmness in pictures such as Crossing the Brook, a stunning scenic view of the Tamar Valley and River from New Bridge near Gunnislake in Cornwall, painted in 1815, a view which can still be admired today.

As he grew older, Turner's behaviour became a bit odd, and he became depressed quite often. He died in Chelsea on 19 September 1851, and was buried next to the painter Joshua Reynolds in St Paul's Cathedral.

Even while Turner was alive, some people thought he was a genius. Some people complained that the pictures he painted when he was older were not realistic, and some even joked that they could have been painted with a mop. However, most think that his way of painting shows complete mastery.

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