Middle years
During the second decade of the 1800s, Turner's painting became
increasingly luminous and atmospheric in quality. Even in paintings of
actual places, such as St. Mawes at the Pilchard Season (1812), the hard
facts of topography are diffused behind pearly films of colour; other
pictures, such as Frosty Morning (1813), are based entirely on effects
of light. In works such as Snowstorm: Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812),
Turner used the power of natural forces to lend drama to historical
events. Turner was much in demand as a painter of castles and
countryseats for their owners, while he also continued to excel in
marine painting. Turner's masterpiece of this period is the Dort, or
Dortrecht: The Dort Packet Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed (1817–18), a
tribute to Cuyp.
With Dido and Aeneas, Leaving Carthage on the Morning of the Chase
(1814), Turner began a series of Carthaginian subjects. The last
exhibitions of his life, at the academy in 1850, included four works on
the same theme. By appending long poetic quotations from James Thomson's
Seasons (1726), from works by Lord Byron, John Milton, William
Shakespeare, and Alexander Pope, or attributed to his own poetic
composition Fallacies of Hope (never completed), Turner showed that he
regarded the literary-historical interpretation of his works as being of
paramount importance.
The coming of peace in 1815 allowed Turner to travel abroad. After a
trip to the field of Waterloo and the Rhine in 1817, Turner set out in
the summer of 1819 on his first visit to Italy. He spent three months in
Rome—also visiting Naples, Florence, and Venice—and returned home in
midwinter. During his journey he made about 1,500 drawings, and in the
next few years he painted a series of pictures inspired by what he had
seen. They show a great advance in his style, particularly in the matter
of colour, which became purer and more prismatic, with a general
heightening of key. A comparison of The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and
the Sibyl (1823) with any of the earlier pictures reveals a far more
iridescent treatment resembling the transparency of a watercolour. The
shadows are as colourful as the lights, and he achieves contrasts by
setting off cold and warm colours instead of dark and light tones.
During the 1820s Turner alternated tours of the continent with visits to
various parts of England and Scotland. In 1827 he painted brilliant
sketches of the regatta at Cowes, and in 1828 he went to Italy again.
From 1828, and particularly after his father's death in 1829, Turner
often visited the earl of Egremont at Petworth, Sussex, producing
splendid sketches of the earl's house and its gardens.
Later life and works
In the later years of his life, Turner was more famous, rich, and
secretive than ever. After several years of inactivity as professor of
perspective at the Royal Academy, he resigned in 1838. By 1846 he owned
a house by the river at Chelsea, where he lived with a widow, Sophia
Caroline Booth, assuming her surname. Turner continued to travel. In the
last 15 years of his life, he visited Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and
France. Observers have recorded the untiring energy with which he
sketched while abroad, and the drawings, numbering about 19,000 in the
Turner Bequest, bear witness to this labour.
While Turner's earlier paintings and drawings show the most accurate
observation of architectural and natural detail, in his later work this
precision is sacrificed to general effects of colour and light with the
barest indication of mass. His composition tends to become more fluid,
suggesting movement and space; some of his paintings are mere colour
notations, barely tinted on a white ground, such as Norham Castle,
Sunrise and Sunrise, with a Boat Between Headlands (both from c.
1840–50). This approach may account for the large number of slightly
brushed-in canvases found in Turner's studio at the time of his death.
These colourful abstractions are often more appreciated at the turn of
the 21st century than the historical and mythological subjects
heexhibited.
Apart from fanciful reconstructions of ancient Rome and the
scintillating Venetian cityscapes, which found ready purchasers in his
day, the outstanding examples of his late work are The ‘Fighting
Téméraire' Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up, 1838 (1839), a
tribute to the passing age of sailing ships as they were about to be
replaced by steam-powered vessels, and Rain, Steam, and Speed—the Great
Western Railway (1844), which expresses Turner's intense interest in the
changes brought by the Industrial Revolution. The first of his pictures
to be hung in Britain's National Gallery was the opalescent The Dogana,
San Giorgio Citella, from the Steps of the Europa (1842), presented in
1847, while Turner was still alive. Turner's preoccupation with the
dramatic elements of fire and water appears in the two versions of
Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (1835), in the large sketch A
Fire at Sea (c. 1835), and in Rockets and Blue Lights (1840).
Turner died in Chelsea in 1851 and was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.
By his will he intended to leave most of his fortune of £140,000 to
found a charity for “decayed artists,” and he bequeathed his finished
paintings to the National Gallery, on condition that a separate gallery
be built to exhibit them. As a result of protracted litigation with his
rather distant relatives, most of the money reverted to them, while both
finished and unfinished paintings and drawings became national property
as the Turner Bequest. It was not until 1908 that a special gallery was
built by Sir Joseph Duveen to house some of the oil paintings at the
Tate Gallery. All the drawings and watercolours were transferred to the
British Museum for safety after the River Thames flood of 1928, when the
storerooms at the Tate Gallery were inundated, but they were returned to
the Tate Gallery on the opening of the Clore Gallery, an addition
designed by James Stirling expressly for that purpose, in 1987. A few of
the oil paintings remain at the National Gallery.
Assessment
Turner was perhaps the greatest landscapist of the 19th century.
Although brought up in the academic traditions of the 18th century, he
became a pioneer in the study of light, colour, and atmosphere. He
anticipated the French Impressionists in breaking down conventional
formulas of representation; but, unlike them, he believed that his works
should always express significant historical, mythological, literary, or
other narrative themes. A line of development canbe traced from his
early historical landscapes that form settings for important human
subjects to his later concentration on the dramatic aspects of sea and
sky. Even without figures, these late works are expressions of important
subjects: the relationship of man to his environment, the power of
nature as manifested in the terror of the storm or the beneficence of
the sun. Unmatched in his time in the range of his development, Turner
was also unrivaled in the breadth of his subject matter and the
searching innovation of his stylistic treatment.
Early in the 19th century, Turner was strongly criticized by
conservative critics for his dynamic compositions and high-keyed colour.
By the end of his life, although his Venetian subjects and more finished
watercolours still appealed to some purchasers, his concern with
atmospheric effects had developed along lines that departed from the
trend in contemporary taste for realism and high finish, typified by the
popularity of complex narrative painting. Turner's growing reputation in
the second half of the 19th century was in fact largely due to the
championship of the influential English art critic John Ruskin, who
published the first part of Modern Painters in 1843 to prove Turner's
superiority to all previous landscape painters and to extol his accurate
rendering of natural appearance. In the 20th century a new appreciation
of the abstract qualities of Turner's late colour compositions
strengthened his status as one of the most innovative and technically
gifted painters of his century.
Martin R.F. Butlin
