Recently, satirical columnist Craig Brown, running through his predictions for the year 2001, proposed that a painting by Turner might win the Turner Prize. This he suggested, would certainly draw the ire of present day Brit Art stars such as Tracey Emin, on the basis that "the guy clearly can't even operate a camcorder". Brown's sally was probably a response to the way Turner's name is routinely evoked in defence of modern art, the argument being that his work was, in its own time, as radical as Brit Art is in ours, and that, if he were alive today, he'd be there pickling sheep with the best of them and making interminable, banal videos.
It's true that, in Turner's lifetime, William Hazlitt quoted an anonymous critic saying of his landscapes that they were "pictures of nothing, and very like". It's also true many an observer might be tempted to say pretty much the same thing today. That's because, as he became increasingly confident of his prowess, Turner was more and more inclined to paint landscapes in which pretty much everything solid and recognisable - ships, cities, mountains, castles - dissolved into an iridescent haze of dazzling sunlight. This is, after all, the man whose last words were reliably reported to be: "The sun is God." He was, as even a cursory glance at his work will confirm, obsessed by light.
Turner: Master of Light is at the National Gallery of Ireland until January 31st.
Top: Turner's The Grand Canal, Venice. Above: San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice (National Gallery)
A self portrait (from the Tate Gallery) and his Sunset over Penworth Park, Sussex (National Gallery)
Exhibition
If Turner were around today it is possible he might be a virtuoso with a camcorder or even a maverick film director with a penchant for visual spectacle, writes Aidan Dunne about an artist who was obsessed with light
Recently, satirical columnist Craig Brown, running through his predictions for the year 2001, proposed that a painting by Turner might win the Turner Prize. This he suggested, would certainly draw the ire of present day Brit Art stars such as Tracey Emin, on the basis that "the guy clearly can't even operate a camcorder". Brown's sally was probably a response to the way Turner's name is routinely evoked in defence of modern art, the argument being that his work was, in its own time, as radical as Brit Art is in ours, and that, if he were alive today, he'd be there pickling sheep with the best of them and making interminable, banal videos.
It's true that, in Turner's lifetime, William Hazlitt quoted an anonymous critic saying of his landscapes that they were "pictures of nothing, and very like". It's also true many an observer might be tempted to say pretty much the same thing today. That's because, as he became increasingly confident of his prowess, Turner was more and more inclined to paint landscapes in which pretty much everything solid and recognisable - ships, cities, mountains, castles - dissolved into an iridescent haze of dazzling sunlight. This is, after all, the man whose last words were reliably reported to be: "The sun is God." He was, as even a cursory glance at his work will confirm, obsessed by light.
Many of his landscapes still have a fresh, radical look about them - although it is true that some of the spectacular lighting effects that are Turner's signature have been diluted and popularised to the extent of becoming formulaic pictorial cliches. Those romantic, vertiginous Alpine views, self-consciously striving for sublimity, can come across now as straining for effect. Except, that is, for the fact that Turner does it all so much better than his legions of imitators.
The annual January showing of the National Gallery of Ireland's Turner watercolours is an unfailingly popular event in the calendar. Some 31 of the 35 works on view were bequeathed to the gallery by Henry Vaughan, one of the major collectors of Turner's work. Vaughan, a Quaker, was the son of a successful hat manufacturer in Southwark. He inherited a substantial fortune when he was 21 and devoted himself to travelling, studying and collecting art. He was a supporter of the two greatest English landscape painters: Constable (whose Hay Wain , and Turner.
When Vaughan died, unmarried, at the age of 91, his collection was distributed among various institutions in the British Isles. The National Gallery of Ireland profited from a particularly generous gesture. Rightly wary of the effects of light on watercolour, he stipulated that the pictures only be on public view for one month each year. In this, he was ahead of his time. Now, though, a general appreciation of the perishability of artwork and advances in conservation and curatorial science mean his strictures needn't be adhered to. Nevertheless, the gallery rightly abides by them and, as it happens, the restriction is a sure-fire way of maintaining interest in the Turners. The collection, augmented by other donations and acquisitions, is extremely impressive, and includes several striking examples of the kind of work that prompted such a negative reaction from Hazlitt's anonymous observer. A Shower over Lake Lucerne is defiantly minimal in its treatment of its subject. Absolutely no concessions are made to pictorial convention; we just get an artist cutting directly to the essence of the subject, so absorbed in it he thinks of nothing else.
When Turner was born in 1775, the son of a barber, he was a long way from the middle-classes where artists were usually found. But he was, by common accord, a precocious and brilliant topographical draughtsman and watercolourist, and as such, much in demand. His formidable skill was his passport to moving up several rungs on the social ladder - he was a Royal Academician by the time he was 24 - but he nurtured few if any social ambitions, being primarily, even obsessively, interested in his work. As he scathingly put it later on: "I hate married men, they never make any sacrifice to the Arts, but are always thinking of their duty to their wives and families, or some rubbish of that sort."
What we know of his own personal life, which he kept so secret that details about it are scant, tends to bear out this sentiment. Turner scholarship has been grievously disadvantaged by the relative paucity of documentary sources. For a variety of disparate reasons, several entire archives of papers relating to his life have not survived, and the prudishness of his great critical champion, John Ruskin, led to the destruction of many of his papers and even some of his art, including erotic drawings and watercolours Ruskin felt were incompatible with his reputation.
Certainly, the evidence suggests Turner treated his lover, Sarah Danby, shabbily, trying to distance himself from responsibility for the two daughters he had with her. His closest, almost conspiratorial, relationship seems to have been with his father, who worked for him. When his mother became mentally unstable, although Turner was by then sufficiently well-off to make her life comfortable, they simply discarded her. Yet there is some evidence that he could be engaging, and even kind, when he chose.
While art was his passion, he also sensibly regarded it as a business and managed his affairs accordingly. A keen, hardy and thoroughly adaptable traveller, ready to proceed on foot, by coach or by boat as appropriate, he was always ready to set out anywhere, visiting and working all over Britain and throughout Europe, sketchbook and watercolours to hand.
However, it seems one of the most popular stories about him, that he had himself tied to the mast of a ship so that he could experience and paint the full ferocity of a storm at sea, is apocryphal. There is, though, no doubting his fascination with the sea.
The great strength of the watercolours in the National Gallery of Ireland is that they provide a good account of the full range of Turner's talent and ability, from the exactingly detailed topographical studies to the most daring "pictures of nothing". You will have to go to the Tate Britain to see a really stunning collection of Turner's oils, but there is no question that in seeing the watercolours you are getting to the heart of what he was about. Not only was he a brilliant and innovative watercolourist, but watercolour technique influenced his best oils, in which he managed to translate the shimmering translucence and the feeling of urgent, instantaneous observation of watercolour into the usually much slower, heavier medium of oil paint.
It is entirely possible, if Turner were around today, he might be a virtuoso with the camcorder, might even be a film director with a penchant for visual spectacle. His ambition, his willingness to up the ante and go for broke, and his stubborn self-confidence and disdain for the opinions of others, suggests a maverick like Stanley Kubrick rather than a mainstream studio talent, but he would surely have loved (in John Boorman's succinct definition of the essence of the film-making process) "turning money into light" - and, businessman that he was, turning light back into money.
Turner: Master of Light is at the National Gallery of Ireland until January 31st.
Top: Turner's The Grand Canal, Venice. Above: San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice (National Gallery)
A self portrait (from the Tate Gallery) and his Sunset over Penworth Park, Sussex (National Gallery)