TURNER, Joseph Mallord William

Turner exhibited a pair of pictures on the theme of the rise and fall of Carthage soon after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. These reflect both on the history of that doomed empire and on the current condition of Britain.

The painting is also called The Bridgewater Sea-Piece.

It was in marine painting, then regarded virtually as a branch of landscape, and in mountain subjects that Turner’s personal vision was first clearly seen. In both the Old Masters played a part. His first exhibited oil had been a moonlit sea-piece, and it was as a companion to a picture by the Dutch painter Willem van de Velde (1611-93) that the future Duke of Bridgewater commissioned Dutch Boats in a Gale in 1801. Turner responded with a vivid account of churning seas and a sky divided between storm clouds and breaking sunshine, in which all is moving and changing. His vigorous painting of waves, viewed from within their troughs, showed his urgent sense of the medium.

Turner’s composition resembles that of his 17th-century predecessor, but Turner added an important dramatic element: the collision of the two ships in the foreground seems unavoidable.

This Yorkshire scene has an air of numbing chill, with rime glistening on earth and wild plants. Turner’s English subjects still looked to the Dutch painter Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691), but he was demonstrating his own contribution to this tradition and the benefits of study direct from nature.

Heriot’s Hospital, seen through the chaotic urban sprawl of early nineteenth- century Edinburgh, appears as an imposing although indistinct silhouette at the centre of this watercolour. Founded through a bequest to the city made by George Heriot (1563-1624), it was a charitable institution dedicated to the education of the orphans of freemen. The hospital, which is a magnificent example of Scottish Renaissance architecture, opened in 1659: today it houses George Heriot’s School. The street in the foreground was the West Bow (now Victoria Street), a steep wynd which ran from the Old Tollbooth Jail down to the eastern end of the Grassmarket.

Turner composes the scene, which he worked on in c. 1819, like a stage set, and contrasts the grand backdrop of the hospital with the crush of tenements and shops to either side. He takes considerable interest in the figures in the foreground, which include street traders, pedlars, and a group pushing a cart of coals uphill, many of whom wear tartan plaid. Particular care has also been taken over the jumble of objects at the right. Near them is a sign which appears to read ‘English School’ - this may be intended as an ironic reference to Turner’s status as an English artist visiting Scotland.

Turner’s early picture, Morning amongst the Coniston Fells, the result of a tour in the north of England in 1797, shows an original awareness of the drama of nature with its subtle play of early sunlight and dispersing mist. There is no overt religiosity, as in Friedrich’s cross, but Turner also chose the upright format associated with the altarpiece, and added further significance by quoting verses alongside his picture in the Academy catalogue. He never painted a purer landscape, and the forces of nature take the place of human or mythological protagonists.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Edvard Grieg: Peter Gynt Suite No 1, Op, 46 (‘Morning Mood’)

This famous painting is a reconsideration of an earlier composition.

In the same Royal Academy exhibition as his Snow Storm, Turner showed a pair of pictures, Peace - Burial at Sea and War, the Exile and the Rock Limpet. The first is a haunting tribute to David Wilkie, who had died and been buried at sea off Gibraltar the previous year, on his way back from a visit to the Holy Land. The other, ostensibly of the exiled Napoleon on his island prison of St Helena, standing against a sky bloodshot as if with the carnage of his wartime campaigns, alluded to Wilkie’s close friend Haydon. Haydon was famous both for his own pictures of Napoleon and for the egotism, paranoia and constant warfare with colleagues, critics and patrons that had by this time brought him to a state of professional exile.

Peace is more than a farewell to a friend: it signals approval for the exemplary harmony in which Wilkie had lived. Its companion piece is a warning and a rebuke. It is characteristic of the painter’s mental state - his basic belief was formed by deism - that the painting he called Peace depicts a burial: that of his famous fellow painter David Wilkie.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 6 minutes):

Franz Schubert: Du Bist Die Ruh’ (Thou Art The Rest), Franz Liszt’s transcription

While in the ‘Fighting Temeraire’ Turner seemed to deplore the Industrial Revolution, his attitude in this, one of his last great works, is much more ambiguous. The 1840s was the period of ‘railway mania’ and the restless Turner appreciated the speed and comfort of this form of travel. An unreliable anecdote by Turner’s champion, Ruskin, records the origins of this picture in a train ride during a rain storm, during which the artist is supposed to have stuck his head out of the window. Excited as ever by strong sensations, Turner replicates the experience in paint, although the viewer is imagined as seeing the approaching train from a high vantage point. The bridge was, and is, recognisable as Maidenhead Viaduct across the Thames between Taplow and Maidenhead, on the newly laid Great Western line to Bristol and Exeter. Begun on Brunel’s design in 1837 and finished in 1839, the viaduct was the subject of controversy, critics of the GWR saying that it would fall down. The view is towards London; the bridge seen at the left is Taylor’s road bridge, of which the foundation stone was laid in 1772.

Once again Turner relies on Claude for the diagonal recession from foreground to a vanishing point at the centre of the picture. The aims of the two artists, however, are very different. The exaggeratedly steep foreshortening of the viaduct along which our eye hurtles to the horizon is used to suggest the speed at which the locomotive irrupts into view through the driving rain, headlight blazing. Ahead of it, disproportionately large, a hare proverbially swiftest of all animals bounds across the tracks; we doubt if it will win the race and escape with its life. A skiff is on the river far beneath, and in the distance a ploughman stoically turns his furrow. Virtuoso swirls and slashes, and smears and sprays of paint, simulate rain, steam and speed to blur these figures of the old countryside. Exhilaration and regret are mingled with alarm; in a second we must leap aside to let the iron horse roar by.

No other Romantic artist was as radical in his depiction of atmospheric phenomena as Turner, who was responsible for taking the British watercolour tradition of the 18th century into the modern era. His watercolours of Venice, painted during his first journey to Italy, amount to a minor revolution, in which the artist recreated the fleeting impressions of a passing moment with the most sparing of means by using pure, transparent surfaces of colour. The coloured background was composed of various layers, each applied while the previous one was still wet.

Turner shows the world as a visionary inter-realm between its origin in chaos and its infernal end. This painting confounds the viewers by the coexistence of traditional painting and the depiction of chaos through a chaotic application of paint. Here Turner was depicting the impotence of seemingly powerful humans faced with the primeval forces of nature.

While the Suffolk-born Constable wished to become a natural painter, Turner, son of a modest barber in Covent Garden, yearned for sublimity. Trained as a topographical draughtsman, he achieved his ambition through mastering the idioms of Claude and of the grander Dutch seventeenth-century marine and landscape painters as well as the melodramatic effects of the scene designer Jacques Philippe de Loutherbourg. Now nearly forgotten, this Alsatian-born member of the French Academy delighted the London public, and influenced artists from Gainsborough to Turner and Joseph Wright of Derby, by staging panoramic peepshows in which painted landscapes, theatrical lighting and sound were combined to simulate natural phenomena and tragic catastrophes.

In search of the Sublime, Turner travelled widely, sketching grandiose scenery and extreme weather conditions, which he translated into canvases exhibited with poetic quotations. He considered Dido building Carthage, or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire (1815) his masterpiece, bequeathing it together with the Sun rising through Vapour to the National Gallery on condition that they be hung beside Claude’s Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba and Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah. (This bequest is now honoured.)

Turner’s emulation of Baroque painting, however, did not exclude modern references, rather transmuting them into ‘high’ art. In this way he competed with both historic and contemporary masters. The ‘Fighting Temeraire’ was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839 with a quotation from Thomas Campbell’s poem Ye Manners of England: The flag which braved the battle and the breeze/No longer owns her’. The Temeraire had distinguished herself at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, but by the 1830s the veteran warships of the Napoleonic wars were being replaced by steamships. Turner, on an excursion on the Thames, encountered the old ship, sold out of the service, being towed from Sheerness to Rotherhithe to be scrapped. In his painting topography and shipbuilding alike are manipulated to symbolic and pictorial ends. Turner conceives the scene as a modern Claude: a ghostly Temeraire and the squat black tug, belching fire and soot, against a lurid sunset. His technique is very different from Claude’s, as thick impastoed rays and reflections contrast with thinly painted areas, and colours swoop abruptly from light to dark. A heroic and graceful age is passing, a petty age of steam and money bustles to hasten its demise. The dying sun signals the end of the one, a pale reflecting moon the rise of the other. But just as Claude’s sunrises and sunsets enlist the viewer’s own sense of journey, so does the last berth of the ‘Fighting Temeraire’ recall the breaking up of every human life.

This dazzling and strange painting is the companion-piece of the Undine. The Angel is none other than the Angel of the Apocalypse from the biblical Book of Revelation. Perhaps the artist was thinking of himself as he conceived the apparition materializing from a blaze of his famous painted sunshine.

Burning of Parliament is the popular name for the fire which destroyed the Palace of Westminster, the home of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, on 16 October 1834. The blaze, which started from overheated chimney flues, spread rapidly throughout the medieval complex and developed into the biggest conflagration to occur in London since the Great Fire of 1666, attracting massive crowds. The fire lasted for many hours and gutted most of the Palace. Westminster Hall and a few other parts of the old Houses of Parliament survived the blaze and were incorporated into the New Palace of Westminster, which was built in the Gothic style over the following decades.

Turner exhibited a pair of pictures on the theme of the rise and fall of Carthage soon after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. These reflect both on the history of that doomed empire and on the current condition of Britain; the fading sunset grandeur of The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire was more a warning of the fate that might ultimately follow British complacency in victory than a comment on defeated France.

A consortium of Turner’s patrons clubbed together to send him to Paris, during an interlude of peace in 1802, to study in the Louvre. He first embarked on a tour of the Alps, whose bleak splendour and subjection to constant climatic and geological change taught him the awesome scale and mutability of nature. The Alpine tour resulted in some spectacular watercolours but also, later, in paintings. He had not, in fact, witnessed an avalanche in 1802, but news of a devastating one in the Grisons in 1808 seems to have prompted him to his picture of 1810, in which huge rocks, driven before the weight of snow, crush a tiny chalet. Without a single human figure, it is a terrible revelation of human vulnerability and natural power - and of the potential of landscape as a ‘Grand Style’ in its own right.

Turner grew from a young art student trained in executing topographical watercolours to the creator of some of the most original landscapes of his time. On his second visit to Venice, probably in September 1833, he created a series of views of the city that betray on the one hand an ardent interest in recording what he saw and, on the other, a Romantic sensibility that suffused his pictures with a sense of the grandeur of nature and of its magnificent light and colour. This picture is based in part on a pencil drawing made during Turner’s first trip to Venice in August 1819 and combines two viewpoints along the Grand Canal. It was shown with four other works in May 1835 at the Royal Academy, where it was well received as one of his “most agreeable works.”

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 10 minutes):

Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto for recorder in A minor

Turner’s Shipwreck is remarkable not only for its stylistic advance, but also for the basically fatalistic vision of man at mercy of the forces of nature.

It was from a German story, by Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de la Motte Fouque, that he took the story of Undine, the sea sprite who, created without a soul, must gain one by marrying a human and bearing his child, but pay the price of assuming all the burdens of humanity. Turner probably knew the story from Hoffmann’s opera (1816) or from a ballet recently seen on the London stage. In this picture of 1846, he marries his sprite to Massaniello, who had led a fishermen’s revolt in seventeenth-century Naples. As a keen fisherman himself, and angry about recent criticism of his work, he doubtless identified with the rebellious Italian. In this union of fact and fantasy, history and myth, body and soul, and its contrasted protagonists, realized in shimmering colours, he seems to comment on his own union with elemental forces of sea, sky and wave.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 7 minutes):

Albert Lortzing: Undine, duet

This picture is based on a series of five detailed sketches made on consecutive pages in Turner’s sketchbook during his second trip to Rome in 1828. This picture is based on a series of five detailed sketches made on consecutive pages in Turner’s sketchbook during his second trip to Rome in 1828. It was commissioned by one of his most important patrons, the artist’s close friend and executor Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro of Novar (1797-1864).

In the same Royal Academy exhibition as his Snow Storm, Turner showed a pair of pictures, Peace - Burial at Sea and War, the Exile and the Rock Limpet. The first is a haunting tribute to David Wilkie, who had died and been buried at sea off Gibraltar the previous year, on his way back from a visit to the Holy Land. The other, ostensibly of the exiled Napoleon on his island prison of St Helena, alluded to Wilkie’s close friend Haydon. Haydon was famous both for his own pictures of Napoleon and for the egotism, paranoia and constant warfare with colleagues, critics and patrons that had by this time brought him to a state of professional exile. Peace is more than a farewell to a friend: it signals approval for the exemplary harmony in which Wilkie had lived. Its companion piece is a warning and a rebuke.

In the War, the Exile and the Rock Limpet, Napoleon, the man who once ruled the world is reduced to a costumed doll, his reflection conversing in a puddle with a rock limpet. The dying sun dominates the centre of the picture and symbolizes world chaos, in which history is played out only as the downfall of an individual. The futility of man’s existence is presented to us by Turner as the ultimate futility of history. Power and decline, greatness and absurdity, importance and banality coincide here.