Turner. Eric Shanes

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      From the mid-1790s onwards we encounter Turner setting out to realise all of these ambitions. Thus his landscapes and seascapes rarely lack some human dimension after this time, and frequently their subject-matter is drawn from history, literature or poetry. The images are also increasingly structured to attain the maximum degree of visual consonance, coherence and mellifluity. The visual equivalent to the aptness of language, measure and imagery encountered in poetry (and to the additional appropriateness of gesture and deportment found in poetic dramas, such as the plays of Shakespeare) was known as ‘Decorum’ in the aesthetic literature familiar to Reynolds and Turner. Many of the latter’s favourite landscape painters, particularly Claude, Nicholas Poussin (1594–1665) and Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), had often observed such Decorum through matching their times of day, light and weather-effects to the central meanings of their pictures.

      Constance

      1842

      watercolour, 30.4 × 45.4 cm

      York City Art Gallery

      By 1800 Turner had also begun to create such appropriateness, and an example of this procedure can be witnessed in the watercolour of Caernarfon Castle displayed at the Royal Academy in that year; as in a particularly ingenious observance of Decorum, Pope’s Villa at Twickenham of 1808 and a far better-known later example, The Fighting ‘Téméraire’ of 1839.

      Decorum is an associative method, and because Turner possessed an unusually connective mind he always found it easy to match times of day, light and weather-effects most appropriately to the meanings of his pictures. He also imbued many of his works with associative devices commonly encountered in poetry.

      Dolbadern Castle, North Wales

      1800

      oil on canvas, 119.5 × 90.2 cm

      Royal Academy of Arts, London

      These are allusions, or subtle hints at specific meanings; puns or plays upon the similarity of appearances; similes or direct comparisons between forms; and metaphors, whereby something we see doubles for something unseen. Occasionally Turner could even string together his visual metaphors to create complex allegories. Here Turner was again following Reynolds, who in his seventh Discourse had suggested that, like poets and playwrights, painters and sculptors should use ‘figurative and metaphorical expressions’ to broaden the imaginative dimensions of their art.

      In the final, 1790 Discourse attended by Turner, Reynolds had especially celebrated the grandeur of Michelangelo’s art. As early as 1794 Turner began doubling or trebling the size of objects and settings he represented (such as trees, buildings, ships, hills and mountains) in order to aggrandise them greatly.

      Caernarvon Castle, North Wales

      RA 1800

      watercolour, 66.3 × 99.4 cm

      Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London

      He would continue to do so for the rest of his life, in ways that ultimately make his landscapes and seascapes seem every bit as grand as the figures of Michelangelo.

      And by 1796, with a watercolour of Llandaff Cathedral, Turner also began making moral points in his works. Often he would comment upon both the brevity of human life and of our civilisations, our frequent indifference to that transience, the destructiveness of mankind, and on much else besides. To that end, and equally to expand the temporal range of his images, from 1800 onwards he started making complementary pairs of works; usually these were on identically-sized supports and created in the same medium, although not invariably so (for example, see the Dolbadern Castle and Caernarvon Castle, which are respectively an oil and a watercolour).

      Sunshine on the Tamar

      1800

      watercolour, 21.7 × 36.7 cm

      Ruskin School Collection

      In these and other ways he responded keenly to Reynolds’s demand that artists should be moralists, putting human affairs in a judgemental perspective. And linked to the moralism was Reynolds’s admonition that artists should not concern themselves with arbitrary or petty human experience but instead investigate the universal truths of our existence, as they are commonly explored in the highest types of poetry and poetic drama. To further this end, Reynolds entreated artists to go beyond the emulation of mere appearances and convey what Turner himself would characterise in an 1809 book annotation as ‘the qualities and causes of things’, or the universal truths of behaviour and form.

      Dutch Boats in a Gale: Fishermen Endeavouring to Put Their Fish on Board (‘The Bridgewater Seapiece’)

      RA 1801

      oil on canvas, 162.5 × 222 cm

      Private Collection, on loan to the National Gallery, London

      We shall return to Turner’s approach to the universals of human existence presently. But from the mid-1790s onwards he began to express ‘the qualities and causes of things’ in his representations of buildings, as can readily be seen in the 1794 watercolour of St Anselm’s Chapel, Canterbury. In works like this we can already detect a growing comprehension of the underlying structural dynamics of man-made edifices. Within a short time, in watercolours such as the Transept of Ewenny Priory, Glamorganshire of 1797, this insight would become complete. And because Turner believed that the underlying principles of man-made architecture derived from those of natural architecture, it was but a short step to understanding geological structures СКАЧАТЬ