Limba engleza

"Between Light and shadows, water and fire, essence and appearance"

SUMMARY:

1)  J.M.W. -Romantic artist

-a few words about  "the romantic movement".

2) Introduction -What made him a great artist?

- critics opinion.

3) Biography -Life and Work

-unhappy childhood;

-drawing and painting: discovering a passion;

-becoming an artist;

-the influences of his personal life over his work;

-being accepted as British greatest watercolourist

- Turner's death.

5) Turner's "gifts" for the world

6) Consulted biography

Joseph Mallord Turner was one of the painters that gave colour to my childhood and to my adolescence, for each time I would see one of his watercolours, my life would be invaded by all kind of feelings, from melancholy to happiness. In my opinion, he is one of the most interesting figures of the Romantic Movement and in the world of art.

I have chosen to realise Turner's biography, even though I knew I couldn't possibly reach complexity on the subject. But the various gifts he left to the world, through his art, made me try to do my best in sharing with you all the information I had about this unique artist's life and creation. So, from this essay, you will be able to discover a few things about J.M. Turner's family, his unhappy childhood, about the way he discovered his passion -drawing, painting and engraving. These following pages will also reveal to you some of the deepest secrets of this wonderful man's life, together with small size reproductions of most of his masterpieces.

I'm sure that, once you will have looked over this certificate, YOU WILL HAVE AN ORGASM LIKE I COULD NEVER HAVE WHEN LOOKIN' AT YOUR DICKS YOU MORUNS STIUCI FITOFAGE CE SUNTETI!!!

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Joseph Mallord William Turner

(1775-1851)

An art movement and style, called romanticism, flourished in the early nineteenth century. It emphasized the emotions painted in a bold, dramatic manner. Romantic artists rejected the cool reasoning of classicism -- the established art of the times -- to paint pictures of nature in its untamed state, or other exotic settings filled with dramatic action, often with an emphasis on the past. Classicism was nostalgic too, but Romantics were more emotional, usually melancholic, even melodramatically tragic.

Paintings by members of the French Romantic school include those by Théodore Géricault (French, 1791-1824) and Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798-1863), filled with rich colour, energetic brushwork, and dramatic and emotive subject matter. In England the Romantic tradition began with Henry Fuseli (Swiss-English, 1741-1825) and William Blake (1757-1827), and culminated with Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851) and John Constable (1776-1837). The German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) produced images of solitary figures placed in lonely settings amidst ruins, cemeteries, frozen, watery, or rocky wastes. And in Spain, Francisco Goya (1746-1828) depicted the horrors of war along with aristocratic portraits.

What was it that led one of the great masters of European landscape painting to stray far from descriptive figuration and move close to near abstract renditions of the visible world as early as 1832?

The question comes to haunt visitors as they walk the three rooms in the Tate Gallery, where some of Turner's most unforgettable masterpieces can be seen

Often called "the painter of light", as well as "the great pyrotechnist", many regard Joseph Mallord William Turner as the greatest British artist of the 19th century and one of Western painting's monumental figures. An English romantic painter of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, he was known as the most original of English landscape artists especially for his dramatic, lavishly   coloured landscapes. In watercolour he is unsurpassed. During his lifetime (1775-1851), Turner achieved fame and fortune for a range of work encompassing seascape and landscape, immensely powerful oil paintings and intimate watercolours. His friend and colleague C. R. Leslie remembered him thus: 'Turner  was short and stout, and had a sturdy, sailor-like walk. He might be taken for the captain of a steamboat at first glance; but a second would find more in his face than belongs in any ordinary mind. There was the peculiar keenness of expression in his eye that is only seen in men of constant habits of observation.' He was one of the finest landscape artists, whose work was exhibited when he was still a teenager. His entire life was devoted to his art. Unlike many artists of his era, he was successful throughout his career.             What makes Turner astonishing, however, is not so much his anticipation of Impressionism as the fact that he went further in handling pure light effects. With equal ease, he painted landscapes of a modernity not yet seen in Western art. For example, ''Shoal on the Seine With an Approaching Steamer'' is a study in blue and white colour drapes applied in near abstract fashion. Except for a chimney in the distance and vaguely suggested trees on the far left, the eye sees toned colour, from the pale mottled blue of the sky with thin over layers of white representing clouds, to the deeper hue of the sea. The ''shoal'' is nothing but a streak of yellow emerging in the bottom corner right.   Turner went further in his exploration of minimalist landscapes. ''The Towers of an Abbey at Sunset" only faintly conjures up the image conveyed by this title. A vast expanse of water circumscribed by wedges of dark-green vegetation and their purplish reflections under a broader band of sky with slanting trails of red colour is at the very edge of abstractionism. Two small reddish bars that rise on the horizon look like extensions of the red mist. It is impossible to recognize in them any architectural feature. In effect, nothing is figural in the detail. It is the overall composition of the view that allows the eye to identify a waterside landscape. No Impressionist would ever be as bold in the representation of nature. Turner transcribed in coloured notes his mental perception of the visible world, stripping it of descriptive characteristics. It was not until the advent of late Fauvism tending toward abstraction as practiced by Wassily Kandinsky at Murnau around 1908-1909 that such systematic elimination of all that is anecdotal and collateral to the essential meaning would be attempted again. How a single artist could operate in this mode and simultaneously remain as brilliantly figural, as in the marvellous painting ''The Mouth of the Seine'', with echoes of Jan van Goyen, is a mystery that no art historian has yet addressed. As for his reasons, Turner kept them to himself.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, sometime in late April or early May 1775 (although the artist himself liked to claim that he was born on 23rd April, St George's Day and coincidentally Shakespeare's birthday). His father, William, was a wig-maker who had taken to cutting hair after wigs began to go out of fashion in the 1770's. We know little about Turner's mother, Mary Marshall, a housewife, other than she was mentally unbalanced, and that her instability was exacerbated by the fatal illness of Turner's younger sister, who died in 1786. Mary died in 1804, having been committed to a mental asylum (Bethlehem mental hospital).             The boy received little schooling (his father taught him how to read). Possibly due to the load placed on the family by these problems(the stress caused by these illnesses), young Turner was sent in 1785 to stay with his uncle on his mother's side in Brentford, which was then a small market town west of London on the banks of the Thames. It was here that he first went to school, and also there he first expressed an interest in painting. A year later he went to school in Margate ,in Kent ,a small holiday resort to the east of London, in the area of the Thames estuary. By the late 1780's Turner was back in London, his formal schooling,

apparently, completed. He was 13 and already making drawings and paintings at home in order to exhibit them in his father's shop window for sale.    As a child Turner made money also by colouring engravings for his father's customers. Around this time he also began working under various architects or architectural topographers, including Thomas Malton Jr., whose influence on his work is discernable.                        At 14, the young artists first known sketchbook was a small 6'x10' book that he filled with drawings of landscapes, a church, houses, and trees. He became especially fond of old buildings, castles, churches, and ruins that he found during his walking tours of the countryside. Walking long distances of as much as 25 miles in a day, with sketchbook in hand would become a practice that he continued throughout most of his life.

After spending a term as a probationer, on 11 December 1789 at the age of 15), he enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools, then the only art school in England Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the academy at that time, chaired the panel that admitted him. At that time painting was not taught in the R.A. Schools (it only appeared on the curriculum in 1816) and students merely learned drawing, at first from plaster casts of antique statuary and then, if deemed good enough -which Turner quickly was - from the nude. Amongst the Visitors or teachers in the life class were History painters such as James Barry and Henry Fuseli whose lofty artistic aspirations would soon rub off on the young Turner.

After only one year's study ,a watercolour of J.M.W., "A View of the Archbishop's Palace in Lambeth" was accepted for the Summer Exhibition of 1790 His unusual talents were soon noticed and in 1793 the seventeen-year-old painter was awarded the "Great Silver Pallet" for landscape drawing by the Royal Society of Arts. Two years later he was providing illustrations for the "Copperplate Magazine" and the "Pocket Magazine". By 1795, having specialized in watercolours and drawings, he became interested in oil painting. One of his first oil paintings, 'Fishermen at Sea' was hung at the Royal Academy in 1796. Turner was 16 at the time, and well on the road to becoming an artist of note.

'Fishermen at Sea'

Throughout the rest of his life, he regularly exhibited at the Academy.

During this time he took his first sketching tour of South and Central Wales in 1792. Most of his pictures during this period were cathedrals, abbeys, bridges and towns (although, in 1796, he was to become interested in painting pictures of the sea). In June and July of 1795 he visited South Wales and the Isle of Wightand later toured the North of England. Between 1794 and 1797 he also coloured sketches and prints made by others, on winter evenings meeting with various artists (including another leading young watercolourist, Thomas Girtin) at the home of Dr Thomas Monro, the consultant physician to King George III and the principal doctor at the mental hospital where Turner's mother was later to be treated and where she subsequently died.

By now, Turner was selling works easily, and he supplemented his income throughout the1790's by giving private lessons.

In 1799, we can discover the artist's self-portrait. This is a Romantic self-image in his early 20's. Turner's eyes are rock-steady, piercing, almost like a bird's. All about him are shadows and mystery. With his unkempt hair, his white neckerchief and silver waistcoat, he paints himself as a hero, staring us down unblinkingly. By painting himself head-on, however, Turner also does his best to minimise the effect of his huge nose. This feature was captured far more cruelly in a profile portrait of him at the age of 17 by George Dance, in which, with his long hair and homely features, Turner looks like a French revolutionary hooligan. He is a revolutionary in this painting too, but an intellectual and aesthetic one. By depicting himself in tenebrous, intense isolation, he sets himself apart as an artist with a mission. 

This painting is superbly dramatic. The unlit background sets him off and seems empty, as if it were deep space and he were a star. He is all light: his blond hair, ruddy cheeks, scarf and waistcoat glow. As a self-portrait, it is also distinctive in what it leaves out. Painters tended to depict themselves in the act of painting. Yet Turner does not even hold a brush. In this painting, like Rembrandt in many of his self-portraits, Turner shows himself as just a face and a mind, without any social or professional attributes. The comparison with Rembrandt is surely intended. The shadowiness around Turner and his glowing flesh seem to emulate the Dutch master. By painting himself in this way, Turner asserts that art takes place in the head. His art is one not of appearance but of imagination. He does not show you something, but provokes you to imagine it.

This portrait is a manifesto for the way his works try to awaken the inner eye.   

Turner' self-image

He never married, but it's thought during this period that he met Sarah Danby, and after her husbands (London composer of glees and catches, John Danby) death in 1798, that she became Turner's mistress in 1799.

By 1802, Turner had become a father. Although he always refused to marry, he is know to have sired two daughters, Eveline and Georgiana, and it has generally been assumed that their mother was Mrs. Sarah. However, recent research has thrown severe doubt on this assumption, and it seems much more likely that the mother of Turner's daughters was Sara's niece, Hannah Danby, who is known to have served Turner as the housekeeper of one of his London residences from the 1820's onwards and to whom the painter left a substantial legacy in his will. Nothing is known of Hannah Danby's personality or her looks as a young woman, but later in life she seems to have been afflicted with a skin disease, so that she appeared rather repulsive.

Unsocial by nature, Turner's genius as an artist could not be overlooked by the art world. His mature work falls into three periods. The first one is considered to be between the years 1800-1820, and is marked by mythological and historical scenes in which the colouring is subdued and details and contours are emphasized.   

By 1800, Turner was acknowledged as one of Britain's leading topographical watercolourist. He received several commissions to illustrate books. His artistic ability was recognised, at the age of 24, when he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy. His participation in the affairs of the Academy was minimal. Turner never showed any real gratitude toward the Academy, as was expected of new members for this high distinction.                                   At this time he moved from his parents home to 64 Harley Streetlater completing a gallery in 1804 at this address, to exhibit his own works. He had few friends, probably because of his volatile nature, sometimes lashing out at his peers. For those who did not know him, and only knew of his art, described Turner as passionately expressive and deeply dramatica true romantic.                  Turner travelled widely in Europe, starting with France and Switzerland in 1802, where he made over 400 sketches. In the same year, on his return trip he stopped in Paris in order to do some studying in several famous museums, especially in the Louvre. There, he spent time finding more about techniques, but also copying the works of the old masters, and of course his love, sketching from nature.                                         He also made many visits to Italy during his lifetime. Venice was the inspiration of some of Turner's finest work. Wherever he visited, he studied the effects of sea and sky in every kind of weather. His early training had been as a topographic draftsman. With the years, however, he developed a painting technique all his own. Instead of merely recording factually what he saw, Turner translated scenes into a light-filled expression of his own romantic feelings.

Although Turner's intellect was enormous, his patchy education and wholehearted commitment to his art meant he cut a poor figure socially, and although in time he would gain in social confidence, his remarkable emotional sensitivity was the cause of a corresponding vulnerability (which may have derived from unhappy childhood experiences brought about by the instability of his mother), and these meant that he always maintained his emotional defenses until he felt that he could fully trust people not to hurt him. When he did trust them, however a completely different side of his personality could emerge.

By 1801, he completed   "The Bridgewater" sea piece,

then he painted "Calais Pier" in 1803

and  

"The Shipwreck", in 1805.

It is a fact that in 1803 Turner's style changed. His impressionistic "Calais Pier" was criticised as being unfinished. For the next few years, the critics attacked him and he had difficulty selling his paintings. One critic called Turner's landscapes 'pictures of nothing, and very alike.' Turner had his supporters, including John Ruskin, who described his paintings as 'true, beautiful and intellectual'.

J.M.W. was increasingly busy during the 1800's. In 1803 he began to construct a gallery for displaying his works in his house in Harley Street, apparently because the contentious atmosphere in the Royal Academy wearied him, although he went on steadily exhibiting there. The first show in Turner's Gallery opened in April 1804, with as many as thirty works on display. Further annual exhibitions were held there regularly until 1810, and then more spasmodically over the following decade.

As he grew older Turner became an eccentric. Except for his father, with whom he lived for 30 years, he had no close friends. He allowed no one to watch him while he painted. He gave up attending the meetings of the Academy. None of his acquaintances saw him for months at a time. Turner continued to travel but always alone. He still held exhibitions, but he usually refused to sell his paintings. When he was persuaded to sell one, he was dejected for days.

At the very end of 1807 Turner took yet another step that was to have enormously beneficial results for his art: he accepted the position of Royal Academy Professor of Perspective. The post had been vacant for some years, and between 1807 and 1811 (when he delivered his first lecture) the painter embarked upon a rigorous study program, reading or re-reading over 70 books on art and aesthetics. Turner went on delivering the lectures spasmodically until 1828 (although he did not resign the position until 1838), and their texts are now in the British Library. They make it clear that Turner did not limit himself to an analysis of perspective. Instead he surveyed his art in it entirety, making his identification with the academic theory of poetic painting and its intrinsic idealism apparent in the process but equally mystifying his audiences, who wanted to learn something less exalted, namely the basics of perspective itself.

In 1812,  Turner exhibited an unusually important picture at the Royal Academy, "Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps". Such a subject had intrigued the painter since the late 1790's when he had copied a portrayal by J.R. Cozens of Hannibal looking down on Italy, a work that is unfortunately now lost.

"Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Armycrossing the Alps"

In 1814 he exhibited two works, one of which "Apullia in search of Apullus", contained a veiled attack on Sir George Beaumont.

"Apullia in search of Apullus"

And in 1815 Turner exhibited two of his greatest paintings to date, "Crossing the Brook" and "Dido building Carthage" or "the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire".

"The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire"

At the Academy, two years later Turner exhibited the companion painting to "Dido building Carthage", namely "The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire".

While in the intervening 1816 show he displayed two complementary pictures of a Greek temple. In one work he portrayed the building as it appeared in contemporary eyes, and this under Turkish subjugation, and in the other he showed it as it had perhaps looked in all its glory in ancient times, and how it might look again if Greece were free. These paintings were Turner's most open statements of his libertarianism to date.

In 1816,Turner made an extensive tour of the north of England to gather subjects for watercolours intended for engraving in the "History of Richmondshire" scheme, a survey of the area around Richmond in Yorkshire and Lonsdale in Lancashire. Originally Turner was to have made 120 watercolours for the "Richmondshire" project, and to have been paid the large sum of 3000 guineas for those drawings, but unfortunately the venture petered out owing to lack of public enthusiasm, and Turner made only some 21 of the designs.

from an engraving in the "History of Richmondshire"

In 1817, the artist stated painting the scene of the recent battle of Waterloo before touring the Rhineland and visiting Amsterdam. Impressive paintings of Waterloo and of the river Maas at Dordrecht were exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year.

"The Field of Waterloo" is a picture stylistically influenced by Rembrandt, and it is also surprisingly modern in

its treatment of its subject, for Turner eschewed vainglory in the work and instead took a very pessimistic, anti-war position.

The view of Dordrecht is an idyllic river scene in which Turner paid homage to one of his favourite Dutch painters, Aelbert Cuyp.

The work was bought by Walter Fawkes who installed it over the fireplace at Farnley Hall as the centerpiece of his collection.

In 1817 Fawkes also bought the complete set of 51 watercolours that Turner had made earlier that year of Rhenish scenery, and in 1819 he put his large collection of watercolours by Turner on display in his London house, an exhibition that was opened to the public.

In 1819, Turner at long last visited Italy, although he had already made a number of superb watercolours of Italian scenery that he had developed from sketches by others. On his tour Turner visited Milan, Venice, Rome, Naples, Sorrento and Paestum, before turning northwards. He probably spent the Christmas in Florence and began his return journey, in late January 1820, once more crossing the Mont Cenis pass where his coach overturned during a snowstorm. He arrived back in London loaded down with some 2000 sketches and studies, and immediately started one of his largest paintings for display at the 1820 Royal Academy exhibition, a view from the loggia of the Vatican, with Raphael in the foreground. Three hundred years after Raphael's death (in 1520) Turner aptly celebrated his immortality.

The paintings of his second period(1820-1835) are characterized by more brilliant colouring and by diffusion of light.

In two of Turner's best works, "The Bay of Baiae - with Apollo and the Sibyl "(1823), and "Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus" (1829), his use of light lends radiance to the colours and softens architectural and topographical forms and shadows.

Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus"

Although Turner was increasingly busy making small watercolours for the engravers during the 1820's (such as the jewel-like drawing of "Portsmouth"), perhaps the most impressive achievements of the first half of the decade were the large and superbly wrought watercolours made for the "Marine Views" scheme and the paintings of "The Bay of Baiæ with Apollo and the Sybil", shown at the Academy in 1823, and of "The Battle of Trafalgar" (the largest picture Turner ever painted ) created between 1822 and 1824 to hang in St James's Palace.

One of the"Marine Views"

  "The Bay of Baiæ with Apollo and the Sybil" "The Battle of Trafalgar"

In 1824 Turner unknowingly visited Farnley Hall for the last time, for in October 1825 Walter Fawkes died and the painter refused to visit the house ever again, so imbued was it with precious memories for him.       Turner's father died in 1829, which had a profound effect on him, and thereafter he was subject to bouts of depression. He never appeared the same man after that event; his family was broken up. He and his father had always been especially close, doubtless because of their mutual reliance on each other during the illness of the painter's mother.                                 The deaths of Fawkes and Turner's father were joined by other losses at this time, most notably that of Sir Thomas Lawrence early in 1830. Turner commemorated Lawrence's funeral in an impressive watercolour he exhibited at the Royal Academy the following summer, the last watercolour he ever displayed there. Many of Turner's figure paintings are associated with Petworth where he spent most of his time, particularly in the years 1828 to1837. Refusing ever to visit Farnley again, after 1826 he took to regularly staying at another 'home from home' owned by one of his patrons, the third Earl of Egremont. The visits to Petworth House in Sussex produced what are perhaps Turner's most idyllic landscapes, the long oblong compositions designed to be set into the paneling of the dining-room at Petworth though replaced a year or two later by the more finished paintings still in the house. The earl was a collector of enormous taste and vigor, and he bought his first painting from Turner early in the century; by the time of his death he owned nineteen of Turner's oil paintings. At Petworth Turner was free to come and go at his leisure, although the age difference between the artist and his patron (the earl was seventy-five when the fifty-one-year-old painter began regularly revisiting the house in 1826) meant that the two men were never as close as Turner and Walter Fawkes had been. J.M.W. Turner's series of figure paintings that he managed to create in these years culminated in "Interior at Petworth", possibly painted under the impact of Egremont's death in 1837, in which the forms are dissolved in an onrush of light.

"Interior at Petworth"

After Lord Egremont died in 1837,Turner shunned Petworth, just as he had shunned Farnley Hall, and for the same reasons: death shut certain doors in his life.

In 1825, Turner embarked upon yet another ambitious set of watercolours destined for engraving, the series entitled "Picturesque Views in England and Wales", a group of drawings that quite rightly has been called "the central document of his art".Like the "Richmondshire" series, it was to have comprised 120 drawings, and the painter created about 100 watercolours for the project before public indifference led to its cancellation in 1838.      

Coast from Folkestone Harbour to Dover

Harlech Castle, North Wales

A Sunset Sky

Black Sky over Water; possibly the Eddystone Lighthouse

Cartmel Sands, Lancashire

A Light House and Harbour; Colour Study

Rain Clouds Sweeping over a Beach:

possibly near Dunstanbrough Castle

Breakers on Coast; Stormy Sky

Land's End, Cornwall, Looking out to Sea

Turner's most advanced pictures, which he began to paint in the late 1820s and early 1830s, transpose in oils the impressions that the artist first jotted down in watercolour and gouache. An early masterpiece of the genre, referred to by Warrell as ''A Sail Boat at Rouen'', shows how intimately linked the oil paintings were to the watercolorist's art.

The sailboat reproduces one seen in a watercolour view of Rouen with the cathedral in the distance - even the shadow effect at the bottom of the main sail is retained in the oil painting. Curiously, the finished oil painting looks more like a first impression than the watercolour. The cathedral towers and other monuments, clearly visible in the watercolour, are reduced to pale hazy silhouettes barely to be made out against the misty glow. The sketchy watercolour effect in his oils was thus deliberate.

In August 1828 Turner again visited Italy. He stayed principally in Rome where he painted and then exhibited his works publicly in a show that attracted over 1000 visitors, who were mostly mystified by what they saw. On his return journey over the Alps in January 1829 Turner's coach was again overturned in the snow (as in 1820), and he recorded the experience in a watercolour .

"Messieurs les voyageurs", that he exhibited in the 1829 Academy Exhibition, was a drawing in which we see the painter himself wearing a top hat and sitting in the foreground.                      

"Messieurs les voyageurs"

In 1829, and again in 1833, he exhibited large groups of the "England and Wales" watercolours and other designs; the later display must have looked especially dazzling, for it consisted of some 67 watercolours made for the series, in which every aspect of British scenery and of Turner's unrivalled mastery of the art of watercolour were evident.                In the hanging of the 1831 Royal Academy show, Turner came into conflict with John Constable. The two painters had known each other since 1813 when Constable sat next to Turner at an Academy dinner. And Constable had a very high regard for Turner's works But in 1831 Constable was on the Academy hanging committee and he had Turner's painting of "Caligula's Palace and Bridge" replaced on the wall by one of his own works, "Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows". Turner opened upon him like a ferret; it was evident to all present that Turner detested him; all present were puzzled what to do or say to stop this. Constable wiggled, twisted and made it appear or wished to make it appear that in his removal of the picture, he was only studying the best light for Turner. However, Turner had his revenge in the Royal Academy the following year. In 1832, when Constable exhibited his "Opening of Waterloo Bridge", it was placed in.one of the small rooms at Somerset House. A sea-piece, by Turner was next to it- a gray picture, beautiful and true, but with no positive colour in any part of it. Constable's 'Waterloo' seemed as if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times into the room which he was heightening with vermilion and lake decoration and flags of the city barges. Turner stood behind him looking from the "Waterloo'" to his own picture, and at last brought his palette from the great room where he was touching another picture, and putting a daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his gray sea, went away without saying a word. The intensity of the red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak. The great man did not come again into the room for a day and a half; and then, in the last moments that were allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he put on his picture, and shaped it into a buoy.' Turner liked playing these kinds of visual games on the Academy walls, where pictures were hung frame to frame.

The painting of 'Fingal's Cave' (Scotland), was also exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1832. It later was cited as 'one of the most perfect expressions of the romanticism style of art'

"Fingal's Cave"

"Fingal's Cave" was the first painting by Turner to go to the United States. It remained unsold for 13 years. James Lenox who bought the piece through a broker, expressed disappointment with his purchase by saying the painting was 'indistinct' in its execution. When Turner heard this, his famous reply was 'You should tell him that indistinctness is my forte.'

Turner also demonstrated his virtuosity in public during the 1830's Perhaps the most spectacular recorded instance of this practice occurred on the walls of the British Institution in 1835 when Turner painted "The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons" almost entirely in one day. He had begun work at first light and he painted all day, surrounded by a circle of admirers and without once stepping back to gauge the visual effect of his labours.                   

After 1833 a new companion entered the painter's life. Turner had continued to visit Margate over the years, and latterly he had taken to staying with a Mrs. Sophia Caroline Booth and her husband, who died in 1833. When the man died, the painter bought the house. Mrs. Booth, the woman who had owned it, continued to live there, as his housekeeper, for a number of years. Shortly afterwards, Turner embarked upon a physical relationship with the widow. Eventually, in the 1840's, she moved with Turner in a cottage that she purchased in Chelsea.                                  She never knew his real name, or that he was a wealthy and famous man. The taverns that he frequented knew him only as an impoverished naval officer by the name of Admiral Booth. Turner was well aware of the precariousness of artistic fortunes, and the perception led him both to become one of the founders of the "Artists' General Benevolent Institution" when it was set up in 1814, and later to attempt to create his own charitable foundation, to be funded by his estate and known as "Turner's Gift". This was intended to support old and penniless artists in almshouses to be built on land Turner also provided in Twickenham. Sadly, such a charity would never be realized, as we shall see.                           

It was sometime around that time, that the artist's last period of creation (1836-1840) started.

Throughout the 1830's and '40's Turner kept up a steady flow of masterpieces in both oil and watercolour. The public did not always understand them,  but their incomprehension did not lead the painter to simplify what he had to say or make his depictions of things more visually approachable; if anything his meanings became more complex and his handling looser as time went by. Yet if pictures like the Venetian scene showing "Juliet and her Nurse" of 1836 proved hard to understand - for why should Juliet be in a city that she never visits in Shakespeare's play? - nonetheless the public had little difficulty in understanding a masterpiece like "The Fighting 'Temeraire' " of 1839.

"Juliet and her Nurse"

"The Fighting 'Temeraire' "

From the start this work was recognized as an elegiac comment upon the replacement of sail by steam and, as such, it is unusual in Turner's oeuvre, for more frequently the painter welcomed technological change.      

Yet from 1839, and particularly because of the vituperation poured on "Juliet and her Nurse" in 1836 by one petty-minded critic, Turner had a new ally to assist in public understanding of what he was about. This was John Ruskin, who between 1843 and 1860 published a five-volume appraisal of Turner's works, "Modern Painters", which was intended to demonstrate, among other things, that, the world had, living amongst it and working for it, the greatest painter of all time. Turner was clearly not too displeased by Ruskin's advocacy, and indeed, it gave him some comfort in the last decade of his life. The late 1830's and the 1840's were not altogether happy years for Turner. He became bitter at having been passed over for a knighthood when lesser figures such as Alexander Callcott and William Allan had been so honored (but the lack of preferment was perhaps inevitable, given that Queen Victoria thought Turner to be quite mad). And, as time passed, his despair at the thought of dying increased. This resulted in somewhat unbalanced behaviour, such as becoming very secretive about his second home with Mrs. Booth in Chelsea, where he even assumed the guise of an "Admiral Booth" in order to shield his identity. He also took to drink, albeit in a relatively mild way, and became obsessed with hording impressions of his prints, in 1838 even buying up all the remaining stock of the "England and Wales" engravings when they were auctioned off and then leaving them to rot in his house in Queen Anne Street. Moreover, although by the late 1840's Turner had begun to form his final wish that all his paintings should go to the National Gallery (a desire that he formulated in final codicils to his will in 1848 and 1849), nonetheless he did little to ensure that they were maintained in good condition. Yet despite the fear of death - an apprehensiveness that was unleavened by any belief in the afterlife - and the eccentric behaviour it led to, the artist did not let those anxieties and eccentricities darken his work. Instead, his late paintings and drawings became ever more beautiful as their creator used them to ward off the terrors of dying and to bring the idealism of a lifetime to a triumphant apotheosis. In 1841, and for the following three summers, Turner returned to Switzerland. Four sets of watercolours resulted from those trips, and they are among the painter's very greatest creations, for in the intensity, beauty and solitude of the Alps; he clearly found some solace for his fears of dying. In the final set especially, drawings that were possibly made between 1846 and 1850, we can apprehend a continuous pulse running behind and through the outlines of discrete objects; the visible universe becomes filled with a primal sense of energy. These paintings do not celebrate merely the physical world: their pulsating energies, intensities of light and dissolutions of form are clearly expressions of something beyond the physical.

In some of his pictures, Turner used a colour symbolism, partly deriving from Goethe's theories, as in the pair of pictures "Light and Colour - the Morning after the Deluge" and "Shade and Darkness - the Evening of the Deluge", exhibited in 1843 with a specific reference to Goethe.

"Light and Colour - the Morning after the Deluge"

Shade and Darkness - the Evening of the Deluge"

These pictures are examples of Turner's experiments with square, octagonal or circular formats in which the vortex composition found its most compact and energetic expression.

In 1844, Turner turned his attention to railways and painted "Rain, Steam and Speed".

The Great Western Railway locomotive, travelling at speeds of more than 90 mph, was the fastest train in Europe at the time. Turner being a passenger during 1844 remarked that he had put his head out the window during a rainstorm, for more than nine minutes to observe the effect of the speed and wind.                                                    

In 1845 the painter took the chair of President of the Royal Academy for some weeks when the actual President, Sir Martin Archer Sheer, was too ill to carry on his duties. In that same year he made the last of his sketching tours, this time to northern France.                                  But also in 1845,Turner's health began to break down, and by the end of the following year it had become very bad, not being helped by the fact that he was losing all his teeth; in his final years he had to gain sustenance from sucking his food. He continued to show a few works every year at the Academy (although not in 1848, the first time since 1824 he had not exhibited), but gradually he began to lose the physical control necessary for painting.

In 1850, however, he summoned forth his last vestiges of strength to display four pictures at the Royal Academy, all treatments of the "Dido and Aeneas" theme. The subject may have had a personal allegorical significance, for Turner's commitment to his art paralleled Aeneas's devotion to duty, a commitment that had led the Trojan prince to abandon Queen Dido in order to sail to Italy and found Rome. Like Aeneas, Turner had also forsworn an easy life, the enjoyment of wealth and the delights of the senses for a higher calling, while Queen Dido stood for everything he had renounced.  His work became more and more unstructured and unstablemuch like his personal life, as he appeared to deteriorate into alcoholism. He became more reclusive, sometimes disappearing for days. After displaying those last four works at the Royal Academy in the late spring of 1850 it appears that Turner was too feeble physically to paint any more and he awaited death over the following eighteen months rather apprehensively and sadly. Occasionally he would be helped onto the flat roof of his house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea to watch the sun rise over the flat pastures of Battersea across the river (what he called the "Dutch view"), or see it set behind the hills to the west (the "English view"), but that was all. The rest was silence.     

In art history the term 'sublime' means something distinct from, and sometimes contrasted with, the beautiful. In regard to nature, the word was often used to describe the wild, grand, and even terrifying, such as mountains and torrents of water.

The high point of the sublime in British landscape painting was reached in the mid-nineteenth century with the death of Joseph Mallord William Turner. He died on 19th December 1851 overlooking the Thames River. The attending Doctor wrote'Just before 9 am the sun burst forth and shown directly on him with that brilliancy which he loved to gaze on. He died without a groan"       Despite the fact that he made few friends, a crowd gathered at St. Paul's Cathedralwhere, at his request, he was laid to rest, beside the tomb of Sir Joshua Reynolds.       In addition to nearly two thousand paintings and watercolours in private hands, he left an immense body of work in the Queen Anne Street and Chelsea studios - some 282 finished and unfinished oil paintings and 19,049 drawings and sketches in watercolour, pencil and other media (in addition to tens of thousands of prints, which were sold off in 1874).                    The artist's will contained two main provisions: that a gallery should be built to house his works and that the charitable foundation, known as "Turner's Gift", should be created. Unfortunately, however, the will was contested by Turner's relatives and overthrown on a legal technicality, the relatives getting the money and the pictures, although until 1987 no gallery was built, and only then did it come into being through private largesse and largely as a result of pressure from an action group, the Turner Society. The triumph of private greed over the realization of "Turner's Gift" was extremely ironic, given that the painter had been so selfless in accruing wealth for the purpose of creating his charitable foundation. But ultimately Turner's supreme gift was his art, and that legacy lives on in a body of work that may have been equaled in size and quality, but which has never been surpassed for its beauty, power and insight into the nature of the human condition, and the conditions in which we live.                Twenty years after his death, the paintings were given over to the British Museum and a prestigious annual art award, the "Turner Prize", created in 1984, was named in Turner's honour.              Although known for his oils, Turner is regarded as one of the founders of English watercolor landscape painting. Some of his most famous works are "Calais Pier", "Dido Building Carthage", "Rain, Steam and Speed", "Burial at Sea", and "The Grand Canal, Venice"( but also the other paintigs he realised in Venice).

"Burial at Sea"

Dogana, Venice

Venice East Approach to Venice

"The Grand Canal, Venice"

Consulted biblioghaphy:

"Turner's Abstract Majesty- A Painter's Brilliance on Display at London's Tate" By Souren Melikian (International Herald Tribune)

"Turner: From Science to Art   " By Souren Melikian (International Herald Tribune)

"Self-Portrait, JMW Turner (c1799) By Jonathan Jones article from "The Guardian", Saturday May 5, 2001)

"Wikipedia" the free encyclopedia).

"Turner"    By Eric Shanes

"The Tate Gallery"

By Sir Edward J. Poynter

"Great Painters and Great Pictures"

By George Kent

The Reader's Digest Association, Pleasantville-Montreal-Sydney)

"Arta Peisajului"

By Kenneth Clark

(in roumanian, by  Eugen Filotti)

"Plastiches et Mélanges"

By Marcel Proust

"Turner"

By Vasile Nicolescu