The Life and Masterworks of J.M.W. Turner. Eric Shanes

      Such problems of visual comprehension could be greatly compounded by Turner’s lifelong construction of covert meanings. Only an entire book given over to this subject (such as the present writer’s 1990 publication, Turner’s Human Landscape) could even begin to do it justice. But it will suffice here to state that for Turner, landscape painting was a vehicle for expressing his responses to the immense variety of human experience, not just a means of stating his recognition that the world around us is a beautiful or a terrifying place. One way of doing that was to resort to associationism, the creation of chains of ideas by means of visual linkage, metaphor, simile and punning. Because Turner was endowed with an innately complex mind, his meanings are necessarily complex. As a result, they have often mystified his devotees. But to grapple with those meanings must be attempted, for if we ignore them many of Turner’s works remain opaque. In these pages such drifts of meaning will certainly be tackled. For far too long, empty explanations – such as ascribing Turner’s images wholly to a supposed awareness of the “sublime” – has proven a lazy way of avoiding the necessity of taking on the many significations of meaning that were certainly set in motion by the painter.

      The failure to understand Turner’s meanings has not been helped by changes in taste either. Thus the gradual emergence of a predilection for French Impressionism led to the widespread belief that Turner was “the First of the Impressionists”. That this misapprehension is now so deeply instilled is perhaps understandable, for it was fostered by many supposedly knowledgeable art critics throughout the twentieth century, and it continues to be propagated. We shall deal with such a false claim below but here it will suffice to emphasise that Turner was most certainly not an Impressionist, even if some of his canvases clearly did exercise a positive influence upon Monet and Pissarro. And then there was Turner’s appropriation by the American Abstract Expressionists. In 1966 he was granted the rare honour for an artist born in the eighteenth century of being accorded a one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The basis for that show was the entirely false premise that, deep down, Turner had really wanted to be an abstract painter but because of the demands of his age, he could only attain that end by disguising his abstraction with the empty trappings of representation, introducing a few meaningless figures here, an occasional boat there or some curious-looking fish elsewhere. Most Turner scholars now think that this was just not the case, for a large body of evidence demonstrates that the painter’s “abstract” images were either underpaintings that were never subsequently overworked, or studies for highly-representational images that derived from them. In any case, throughout his life the painter had undoubtedly been a representationalist, so why would he have developed into an opposite kind of artist in his later years? Given his writings, it appears far more likely that in his late works Turner simplified his shapes and raised the pitch of his light to a blazing level in order to project an ideal, platonic world of form and feeling. The arrival at such a realm through art had certainly been advocated by the theorist on painting who most powerfully influenced Turner throughout his life, namely Sir Joshua Reynolds. And that move onto some higher and more profoundly true reality than the one we occupy was surely what Turner the visionary was attempting to depict as he neared his end, not the emptying out of reality into meaningless abstraction.

      Ultimately these widespread misapprehensions do not matter, for we each take from a work of art just what we need from it; such is its utility. The world in which we now live understandably forces us to seek beauty in order to offset all the ugliness that increasingly surrounds us. Turner provided that loveliness in abundance. He also furnished us with so much more: the fearsome power of nature, its ineffable peace, its immense grandeur, its underlying behavioural constants and, just as much, all the doings of man. In these pages alone the latter includes trading, carting, sailing, whaling, imprisoning, electing, gawping, scurrying, celebrating, bickering, squabbling, building, destroying, fighting, suffering, drowning, dying and mourning. Here was a painter who stood firmly within the modern industrial epoch in which we now all live and still perceive the last vestiges of the pre-industrial world that lingered all around him. Among many other things he made it his business to capture both the old world order and the brave new world, and to do so with enormous invention and finesse. That is surely one of the reasons we so treasure his works and why we will probably always do so. Turner pointed towards the past, the present and the future. In that sense he was truly timeless.

      The Life

      J. W. Archer, J. M. W. Turner’s second home at 26 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, 1852, watercolour, The British Museum, London, U. K. The Turner family moved here from the artist’s birthplace across the road in 1776.

      From darkness to light: perhaps no painter in the history of western art evolved over a greater visual span than Turner. If we compare one of his earliest exhibited masterworks, such as the fairly low-keyed St Anselm’s Chapel, with part of Thomas-à-Becket’s Crown, Canterbury Cathedral of 1794, with a brilliantly-keyed picture dating from the 1840s, such as The Clyde (both of which are reproduced below), it seems hard to credit that the two images stemmed from the same hand, so vastly do they differ in appearance. Yet this apparent disjunction can easily obscure the profound continuity that underpins Turner’s art, just as the dazzling colour, high tonality and loose forms of the late images can lead to the belief that the painter shared the aims of the French Impressionists or even that he wanted to be some kind of abstractionist, both of which notions are untrue. Instead, that continuity demonstrates how single-mindedly Turner pursued his early goals, and how magnificently he finally attained them. To trace those aims and their achievement by means of a selective number of works, as well as briefly to recount the artist’s life, is the underlying purpose of this book.

      Joseph Mallord William Turner was born at 21 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, sometime in late April or early May 1775. (The artist himself liked to claim that he was born on 23 April which is both the English national holiday, St George’s Day, and William Shakespeare’s birthday, although no verification of that claim has ever been found.) His father, William, was a wig-maker and barber. We know little about Turner’s mother, Mary (née Marshall), other than that she was mentally unbalanced, and that her instability was exacerbated by the fatal illness of Turner’s younger sister, who died in 1783. Because of the stresses put upon the family by these afflictions, in 1785 Turner was sent to stay with an uncle in Brentford, a small market town to the west of London. It was here he first went to school. Brentford was the county town of Middlesex, and had a long history of political radicalism, which may have surfaced much later in Turner’s work. But more importantly, the

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