The Life and Masterworks of J.M.W. Turner. Eric Shanes
images, throughout his life Turner followed a procedure recommended by Reynolds. This was ideal synthesis, which was a way of overcoming the arbitrariness of appearances. Reynolds accorded landscape painting a rather lowly place in his artistic scheme of things because he held landscapists to be mainly beholden to chance: if they visited a place, say, when it happened to be raining, then that was how they would be forced to represent it if they were at all “truthful”. In order to avoid this arbitrariness, Reynolds recommended another kind of truth in landscape painting. This was the practice of landscapists like Claude le Lorrain, who had synthesised into fictive and ideal scenes the most attractive features of several places as viewed in the most beautiful of weather and lighting conditions, thus transcending the arbitrary. Although Turner gave more weight to representing individual places than Reynolds was prepared to permit, this individuation was largely offset by a wholehearted adoption of the synthesising practice recommended by Reynolds (so much so that often his representations of places bore little resemblance to actualities). As Turner would state around 1810:
To select, combine and concentrate that which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art is as much the business of the landscape painter in his line as in the other departments of art.
And Turner equally overcame arbitrariness by employing his unusual powers of imagination to the full. He stated his belief in the supremacy of the imagination in a paraphrase of Reynolds that stands at the very core of his artistic thinking:
…it is necessary to mark the greater from the lesser truth: namely the larger and more liberal idea of nature from the comparatively narrow and confined; namely that which addresses itself to the imagination from that which is solely addressed to the Eye.
Yet this does not mean that Turner neglected the eye. He was an inveterate sketcher, and there are over 300 sketchbooks in the Turner Bequest, incorporating over 10,000 individual sketches. Often he would sketch a place even if he had sketched it several times before. By doing so he not only mastered the appearances of things but also honed his unusually retentive memory, which is a crucial tool for an idealising artist, inasmuch as memory sifts the essential from the inessential.
Turner’s principal method of studying appearances and still allowing himself room for imaginative manoeuvre was to sketch a view in outline, omitting any effects of weather and light, or even its human and other live inhabitants (if needed, those ancillaries could be studied separately). He would then return to the sketch at a later date, supplying many visual components of the scene mainly from memory and/or the imagination. Turner kept all his sketchbooks for later reference, and sometimes he would return to them as much as forty years after they were first used in order to obtain the factual data for an image. This practice began in the early 1790s, and it is easy to perceive how it grew directly out of the idealising admonitions of Reynolds.
Another, higher kind of idealisation grew out of Reynolds' teachings as well. From fairly early on in his career Turner came to believe that ultimately forms enjoy a metaphysical, eternal and universal existence independent of man. This apprehension first formed through the analysis of architecture. Like many before him, Turner maintained that not only is there a profound linkage between man-made architecture and natural architecture, but that a universal geometry underlies both. After the mid-1790s this belief was fuelled by a close reading of poetry, most particularly the verse of Mark Akenside, whose long poem “The Pleasures of the Imagination” states a platonic idealism with which Turner completely identified, with momentous results for his art.
In post-1807 perspective lecture manuscripts, Turner wrote of the artistic necessity of making earthly forms approximate to such “imagined species” of archetypal, platonic form. He followed many others in characterising these ultimate realities as “Ideal beauties”. From such an apprehension it was easy for him eventually to believe in the metaphysical power of light, and even – because it is the source of all earthly light and physical existence – that “The Sun is God” (as he stated shortly before his death). Due to such a viewpoint it is clear that the near-abstraction of Turner’s late images is no mere painterly device, despite many recent claims to the contrary. Instead, it resulted from an attempt to represent some higher power, if not even the divinity itself. Turner’s idealism was lifelong. Everywhere in his oeuvre, but especially in his later works, we can witness the projection of an ideal world of colour, form and feeling. Not for nothing did a writer in 1910 imagine that if Plato could have seen a Turner landscape, he would “at once have given to painting a place in his Republic”.
Only in one important respect did Turner depart from the teachings of Reynolds: his representations of the human figure. Another reason Reynolds held landscape painting in fairly low esteem was because it had never said much about the human condition, which for him was necessarily the principal concern of high art. From the outset Turner became intent on disproving him: to imbue landscape and marine painting with the humanism encountered in genres more directly concerned with mankind was his lifelong ambition. But he quickly realised that in order to be absolutely truthful to his own insight into the human condition he would have to reject a central aspect of Reynolds' thinking. For the great teacher, as well as for a host of other academic theorists of like mind, one of the supreme purposes of poetic painting was to exalt mankind through projecting an ideal beauty of human form: to that end Reynolds recommended the creation of beautified physiques similar to those encountered in the works of Michelangelo and other comparable idealising artists. But Turner rejected that central tenet of the Theory of Poetic Painting. Instead, he consciously evolved a decidedly unidealised physique for his representations of humanity.
J. M. W. Turner, South view from the cloisters, Salisbury Cathedral, c. 1802, watercolour, 68 × 49.6 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, U. K. This is one of a set of large views of the cathedral made for Sir Richard Colt Hoare.
J. M. W. Turner, The Passage of Mount St Gothard, taken from the centre of the Teufels Broch (Devil’s Bridge), Switzerland, signed and dated 1804, watercolour, 98.5 × 68.5 cm, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria, U. K.
Even by 1794, as in the Canterbury Cathedral view reproduced below, we can see Turner drawing upon Lowlands painting for the formation of his figures. He especially modelled his people upon those by David Teniers, the younger (1610–1690). Precisely because of his intentionally boorish people, Teniers had a large following in Britain, especially among members of the upper class, who found them droll (which is why many British country houses still have pictures by Teniers hanging on their walls). In impressive marine paintings such as the “Bridgewater Seapiece” of 1801, the Calais Pier of 1803 and The Shipwreck of 1805 (all reproduced below), Turner consciously imitated the appearance of Teniers' figures in order to state the central moral contrast of his entire art as far as humanity is concerned: the world around us may be immense, beautiful, ugly, peaceful, ferocious or whatever, but humankind is small, vain and of exceedingly limited strength within that surround. For Turner we are not the “lords of creation”. Far from it. Instead, we are merely insignificant specks of matter in an often hostile and always indifferent universe. We may try to overcome the forces of external nature, but such attempts are both a cosmic and a comic self-delusion. To underline this “fallacy of hope” Turner constantly made us look as imperfect, gauche, crude, child-like or even doll-like as possible, just as Teniers and other painters influenced by that Flemish artist (including de Loutherbourg) had represented us. In this respect he was consciously turning his back on a dominant aspect of the academic idealism propounded by Reynolds, namely the formation of beautified human archetypes. But if Turner had filled his works with heroic, Michelangelesque figures, those people would have severely diminished what he had to say about our lowly place in the universal scheme of things. Instead, by creating an anti-heroic and “low” model for humanity, Turner not only maximised the contrast between humanity and the natural world beyond us but simultaneously he stated something that is even more intensely truthful and universal about humankind than Reynolds had demanded. Turner lived in an age in which the majority of people were often made ugly by the harshness of survival, and endured tragically short, brutalised, uneducated and anonymous lives. He represented such people countless times, and his consciously imperfect figures are totally congruent with the extremely imperfect lives