TURNER

Three oil paintings at the National Museum Cardiff were revealed as genuine works by renown British artist J.M.W. Turner this week, the BBC reports. The paintings, which were originally deemed fakes and then ignored for nearly 50 years, have been reevaluated by recent forensic examinations and are now reportedly worth millions.

The Beacon Light, photo courtesy of the National Museum Wales

The oils were first discounted in 1956 after being left to the National Museum five years earlier by Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, two of the most prominent benefactors of public art in Wales. "Off Margate and Margate Jetty were deemed wrong," explained curator Beth McIntyre to the BBC. "The Beacon Light was said to feature rudimentary beginnings by Turner overpainted by another artist, to the extent that it was not a Turner."

Thanks to modern developments in the field of art investigation, the works resurfaced to undergo a series of X-ray, infrared and pigment analyses. The results were positive, turning even the opinion of long-time doubter and art expert Martin Butlin. In an episode of BBC One's "Fake or Fortune," Butlin stated, "We do occasionally change our minds when we have the right evidence."

Off Margate, photo courtesy of the National Museum Wales

Margate Jetty, photo courtesy of the National Museum Wales

The three works will join four other Turner paintings bequeathed to the National Museum Wales in a landmark exhibition that begins today. For the first time in history, the museum's seven-piece Turner collection will be on view to the public.

This isn't the first time -- or even second -- that the works of J.M.W. Turner have popped up in headlines this month, however. Earlier in September, an artist by the name of Christian Furr stumbled across what some experts believe could be a long-lost Turner painting, potentially worth around £20 million according to The Daily Mail. And shortly after that, The Guardian reported that a man named Jonathan Weal claimed to have uncovered yet another Turner creation, which backed by art experts and scientific tests was revealed to also be worth £20 million.

Let us know what you think of the Turner redemption in the comments section, and check out a slideshow of the artist's stormy work below.

A NEW AGE OF ART DISCOVERY

  

                                                                 
            
Shipwreck, the Rescue c1802J.M.W. Turner R.A.  (161 x 222 cm)

Shipwreck, the Rescue: historically, this painting was 'the prize' of several Connoisseurs (provenance), all were  English. So how did this major work fromTurner's early monumental sea-disaster series leave the country in the first place! A series of somewhat shocking revelations will soon answer this question. Joseph Mallord William Turner

This website is largely based on a recent re-discovery of one of J.M.W. Turner'smost historic and monumental paintings--Shipwreck, the Rescue. The efforts needed to uncover the history of this 'sea piece' were arduous but truly enlightening. Sharing the anxiety, torment, and excitement of this five year adventure will hopefully assist those with a similar challenge. It will also help those who want to understand how the art world functions at the top. In conjunction there are other important points of connoisseurship introduced. For example issues pertaining to Copies.  

What follows is a brief outline of the website. For a more complete and entertaining rendition of the story read the book  Art World’s Dirty Little Secret  jmw  Joseph Mallord William Turner

-Introduction (below) This leads to a short overview of related artwork from Turner's earliest period, as well as, an in-depth discussion about Turner's style, a topic that is woven throughout  the website.

-Scientific examination  This entails a detailed look at the painting using leading edge testing techniques. Questions are raised over contradictory statements made by Tate Gallery officials. This seemingly obstructive contribution, although a difficult matter at first, becomes somewhat understood by the end of our story. See Tribal Instincts, andInstitutional Evolution.  jmw

-The Scientific report unravels much of the puzzle involved in dissecting a painting for forensic purposes. jmw Joseph Mallord William Turner

-Provenance (Christie's)   Provenance is held as a critical part of the art authentication process, and in turn, the level of Connoisseurship of the previous owner of an artwork becomes the ultimate test of quality. In this regard Shipwreck, the Rescue is no exception.

-Fingerprints and Inscription  jmw

-Martin Butlin's Visit  Here, Martin Butlin, a fêted JMW Turner aficionado, co-author of the Butlin and Joll catalogue on Turner's work, and art world insider makes a pilgrimage to spend a week in Canada. This visit is briefly described at various points throughout the website i.e. 'Ehrenbrietstein; the hand theory'. The discussions that took place during the entire stay are dealt with more substantially in the book. In fact roughly a quarter of the book is allocated to an ongoing discourse of art-world revelations. Beside issues over Turner's body of work, legal fears, and monopolistic practices; dialogue concerning art dealers, auction firms, and the art establishment generally, is presented verbatim.
The most unspeakable result of what might be considered dirty art politics, was what happened to the American legend, John Anderson Jr., author of The Unknown Turner.

SNOW STORM

Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps is an oil on canvas painting by JMW Turner, first exhibited in 1812. Left to the nation in the Turner Bequest, it was acquired by the National Gallery in London in 1856, and is now held by the Tate Gallery.

The painting depicts the struggle of Hannibal's soldiers to cross the Maritime Alps in 218BC, opposed by the forces of nature and local tribes. A curving black storm cloud dominates the sky, poised to descend on the soldiers in the valley below, with an orange-yellow sun attempting to break through the clouds. A white avalanche cascades down the mountain to the right. Hannibal himself is not clearly depicted, but may be riding the elephant just visible in the distance. The large animal is dwarfed by the storm and the landscape, with the sunlit plains of Italy opening up beyond. In the foreground,Salassian tribesmen are fighting Hannibal's rearguard, confrontations that are described in the histories of Polybius andLivy. The painting measures 146 centimetres (57 in) by 237.5 centimetres (93.5 in). It contains the first appearance in Tuner's work of a swirling oval vortex of wind, rain and cloud, a dynamic composition of contrasting light and dark that will recur in later works, such as his 1842 painting Snowstorm.

Turner saw parallels between Hannibal and Napoleon, and the historic Punic War between Rome and Carthage and the contemporary Napoleonic Wars between Britain and France. The painting is Turner's response to Jacques-Louis David's portrait of Napoleon Crossing the Alps, of Napoleon leading his army over the Great St Bernard Pass in May 1800, which Turner had seen during a visit to Paris in 1802. Turner set his painting in the Val d'Aosta, one of the possible routes that Hannibal may have used to cross the Alps, which Turner had also visited in 1802.

Identifying Napoleon and France with Hannibal and Carthage was unusual: as a land power with a relatively weak navy, France was more usually identified with Rome, and the naval power of Britain drew parallels with Carthage. A more typical symbolism, linking the modern naval power of Britain with the ancient power naval of Carthage, can be detected in Turner's later works, Dido Building Carthage, and The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire.

The irregular composition, without geometric axes or perspective, breaks traditional rules of composition. It is similar to Turner's 1800-2 watercolour, Edward I's Army in Wales, painted to illustrate a passage from the poem The Bard by Thomas Gray, in which an army marches diagonally across the painting through a mountain pass, and is assailed by an archer to the left of the painting. Turner sketched out the foreground figures as early as 1804, and had observed an impressive storm from Farnley Hall, the house of Walter Fawkes in Yorkshire, in 1810; making notes on the back of a letter, he remarked to Fawkes' son Hawkesworth that its like would be seen again in two years, and it would be called "Hannibal crossing the Alps". Turner may also have been inspired by a lost oil painting of Hannibal's army descending the Alps into northern Italy by watercolourist John Robert Cozens, A Landscape with Hannibal in His March over the Alps, Showing to His Army the Fertile Plains of Italy, the only oil painting that Cozens exhibited at the Royal Academy, and also an entry in list of imaginary paintings written by Thomas Gray, which speculated that Salvator Rosa could have painted "Hannibal passing the Alps". Another spur to make the painting could have been the visit of a delegation from the Tyrol to London in 1809, seeking support to oppose Napoleon.

The painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition at Somerset House in 1812, accompanied in the catalogue with some lines from Turner's unfinished epic poem "Fallacies of Hope":

Craft, treachery, and fraud — Salassian force,
Hung on the fainting rear! then Plunder seiz'd
The victor and the captive, — Saguntum's spoil,
Alike, became their prey; still the chief advanc'd,
Look'd on the sun with hope; — low, broad, and wan;
While the fierce archer of the downward year
Stains Italy's blanch'd barrier with storms.
In vain each pass, ensanguin'd deep with dead,
Or rocky fragments, wide destruction roll'd.
Still on Campania's fertile plains — he thought,
But the loud breeze sob'd, "Capua's joys beware!"

Turner insisted that the painting should be hung low on the wall at the exhibition to ensure it would be viewed from the correct angle. It was widely praised as impressive, terrible, magnificent and sublime.

The painting was left to the nation in the Turner Bequest in 1856 and held by the National Gallery until it was transferred to the Tate Gallery in 1910.

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  J.M.W. Turner, Snowstorm, 1842

  
  

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TURNER

Turner and Wordsworth created embodiments of Burke's descriptions of sublimitythat make explicit his notion of a subjective, experiential world. urner'sSnow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842), one of the paintings in whose defense Ruskin began Modern Painters, plunges us into the midst of a storm at sea: the whirling vortex of water, sea-mist, and smoke draws us into the scene, making us look not at the storm but through it. The power, magnificence, obscurity, and awe of the Burkean formulation all present themselves as major components of the experience. But, again, the viewer, like the painter before him who immersed himself in the storm on the Ariel, does not see these qualities as qualities of an object or scene but as qualities of subjective experience. Furthermore, as Jack Lindsay has shown, Turner's similar early paintings, such as Snow-storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812), demonstrate the painter discarding earlier neoclassical schemes of composition in an attempt to fuse the elements of form, chiaroscuro, and color. "In their place he put a dynamic form of spiral, an explosive vortex, a field of force."[J.M.W. Turner: A Critical Biography (New York, 1966), 120].

In other words, in place of the static composition, rational and controlled, that implies a conception of the scene-as-object, Turner created a dynamic composition that involved the spectator in a subjective relation to the storm. Similarly, certain passages in Wordsworth's Excursion, the poem which furnished the epigraph to Modern Painters, present us with the phenomenological world of sublime experience. Thus, although the poem frequently employs the term "sublime," mentioning, for instance, a "burst/Sublime of instrumental harmony," "unity sublime," and the "sublime ascent" of man's hopes, sublimity appears not so much in the use of the term as in the poet's presentation of sublime experience in the midst of a majestic dynamic natural scene of which the spectator becomes a part [Works, v, 146, 3n6, and 289].