Studying JMW Turner

 Studying JMW Turner

 

 

The Courtauld Summer School is an excellent series of one-week intensive art history courses, held, these last 2 years, online. Last year, I went to France to visit Manet and Cezanne (see blog post “Being a Zoom Student”, July 2020). This year, as befits the time of final Brexit, I withdrew to England.

 

Even fittingly, I returned to an era of glorious triumph (over the French) and the beginnings of British industrial dominance. This is the early C19. Of the two artists I studied, John Constable might be considered as the poster (or painter) boy of a certain nostalgia underlying Brexit, being a reactionary Tory of a very particular shire, who hated “Abroad”, as well as being a supremely talented landscape painter.

 

The other artist is Turner, a far more complicated man, both in political outlook and artistic development. Whereas Constable never travelled abroad, never wanted to, Turner visited Europe constantly, when cessation of wars allowed. (Apart from a brief peace for a couple of years in the early 1800s, continental Europe was effectively closed to travel from Britain until after the battle of Waterloo in June 1815 – by which time Turner was 40 years old.)

 

There was a connection between my choice of courses in 2020 and 2021. I wondered, like many, many others, whether there is demonstrable connection between Turner, especially in in his later works, which often wholly or partially dissolve into swirling colours, and the Impressionists.

 

Curators of numerous exhibitions of recent times have teased visitors with the alleged similarities, and have even extended Turner’s alleged descendants to include the Abstract Expressionists.

 

Alas, the Courtauld’s scholarly tutors don’t allow any glib transfer of Turner’s innovations to subsequent schools. First, he did not have any significant followers in England. More pertinently, his work was not exhibited or sold abroad much. The first time that some of the leading French Impressionists seriously studied Turner was in the 1870s, when many French painters fled to England because of the Franco-Prussian war and the subsequent insurrectionary Paris Commune.

 

By this time French Impressionist philosophy and techniques were well established, even if they had arrived at some methods somewhat similar to some of Turner’s. So we are cautiously entitled to the judgment that Turner anticipated certain of the innovations of Impressionism, but was not the “father” of the movement.

 

(Ironically, it was the insular Constable that might be considered a major tributary of the Impressionist river. His work was successful in France, and had a powerful influence on French landscape painters, and their choice of everyday subjects. Courbet and Corot, for example, were inspirations for the early Impressionists, as “painters of modern life”.)

 

Turner strove to depict the natural and the unnatural (fire, steam), often at their most extreme. If this meant that the realism of a scene was overwhelmed or dissolved, then so be it – that, Turner reasoned, was the effect of a storm at sea, or the onrush of a steam locomotive. It did not mean that he had abandoned realism for an entirely new artistic project.

 

This summer there is a Turner Exhibition at Tate Britain- Turner’s Modern World- celebrating the artist’s engagement with the public events and technological advances of his lifetime, in war and peace.

 

Many of the paintings have an emphasis on the horror and pity of war, or other natural or man-made disasters. Except for some self-consciously patriotic examples (the climax of the Battle of Trafalgar, for example), his battle and disaster scenes foreground the dead, dying, injured, or terrified.

 

In the Battle of Fort Rock a young woman comforts a wounded or dying soldier. In Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army  Crossing the Alps (allegorising Napoleon’s fateful winter Russian campaign) hostile tribesmen stab fallen Carthaginians. In Loss of an East Indiaman helpless passengers await the foundering of their vessel in a storm. The Field of Waterloo shows, not an epic battle scene, but piles of corpses, British, Prussian, French, united in death.

 

Most shocking of all, Slave Ship depicts the throwing overboard of dead or dying, or alive, human cargo.

 

Some critics are sceptical about Turner’s humanitarianism. Citing his undoubted interest in making money, they suggest that Turner spotted commercial opportunities in catching the spirit of fashionable radical causes; and people of a radical turn, admirers 0f Byron and Shelley, did include many wealthy connoisseurs. But I think that Turner’s sympathy with those that suffer is too consistent and enduring throughout his career to be thus wholly dismissed.

 

Turner, since last year (2020) is part of our currency – or more precisely, he has taken over the decoration of the £20 note.

 

There’s an image of the (self-flattering) self portrait of Turner in his 20s. Behind is an image of his most ‘popular’ painting – The Fighting Temeraire, of the old battleship being towed by a steamboat to the breaker’s yard in 1838.

 

The Temeraire had been built 40 years earlier. She had entered the Nation’s naval folklore by taking a distinguished part in the Battle of Trafalgar, but was nearly destroyed in performing heroics. Hence Fighting.

 

In the painting whose image is reproduced, sail ship and tug come solemnly onwards beneath the spreading, flaring colours of a “setting” sun.

 

(The sun has always been viewed as “setting”, although it’s in the wrong position. The Temeraire was towed from East to West up the Thames to Rotherhithe, so astronomically the sun, behind the vessels, should be rising.)

 

The tugboat’s stack belches fire and smoke, in the sunset’s colours, and behind comes the Temeraire drained of colour except for white and ethereal gold. So, a noisy, dirty, but oh so energetic representative of a New Age, and a ghostly relic of the Old.

 

The Temeraire is doubly a ghost. In reality, when it was towed to the breakers, it was already a dismasted hulk.

Turner has given it the nobility of its old masts, so that the ghost is a ghost of the ship in its prime.

 

July 2021