Turner. Eric Shanes

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      Certainly, Turner made apparent the ‘qualities and causes’ of the latter types of forms by early in the following century (for example, see the rock stratification apparent in The Great Fall of the Riechenbach, in the valley of Hasle, Switzerland of 1804).

      From the mid-1790s onwards we can simultaneously detect Turner’s thorough apprehension of the fundamentals of hydrodynamics. The Fishermen at Sea of 1796 demonstrates how fully the painter already understood wave-formation, reflectivity and the underlying motion of the sea. From this time onwards his depiction of the sea would become ever more masterly, soon achieving a mimetic and expressive power that is unrivalled in the history of marine painting. Undoubtedly there have been, and still are, many marine painters who have gone far beyond Turner in the degrees of photographic realism they have brought to the depiction of the sea.

      South View from the Cloisters, Salisbury Cathedral

      c. 1802

      watercolour, 68 × 49.6 cm

      Victoria and Albert Museum, London

      This is another of the set of large views of the cathedral made for Sir Richard Colt Hoare

      Yet none of them has come within miles – nautical miles, naturally – of expressing the fundamental behaviour of water. By 1801, when Turner exhibited ‘The Bridgewater Seapiece’, his grasp of such dynamics was complete. By that time also the painter had simultaneously begun to master the essential dynamics of cloud motion, thereby making apparent the fundamental truths of meteorology, a comprehension he attained fully by the mid-1800s. Only his trees remained somewhat mannered during the decade following 1800. However, between 1809 and 1813 Turner gradually attained a profound understanding of the ‘qualities and causes’ of arboreal forms, and thereafter replaced a rather old-fashioned mannerism in his depictions of trunks, boughs and foliage with a greater sinuousness of line and an increased sense of the structural complexity of such forms.

      Calais Pier, with French Fishermen Preparing for Sea: an English Packet Arriving

      RA 1803

      oil on canvas, 172 × 240 cm

      Turner Bequest, National Gallery, London

      By 1815 that transformation was complete, and over the following decades, in works such as Crook of Lune, looking towards Hornby Castle and the two views of Mortlake Terrace dating from 1826 and 1827, Turner’s trees would become perhaps the loveliest, most florescent and expressive natural organisms to be encountered anywhere in art.

      All these various insights are manifestations of Turner’s idealism, for they subtly make evident the ideality of forms, those essentials of behaviour that determine why a building is shaped the way it is in order to stand up, why a rockface or mountain appears as it does structurally, what forces water to move as it must, what determines the way clouds are shaped and move, and what impels plants and trees to grow as they do.

      High Street, Oxford

      1803

      oil on canvas, 68.5 × 100.3 cm

      Lloyd Collection

      No artist has ever matched Turner in the insight he brought to these processes. This was recognised even before his death in 1851 by some astute critics, especially John Ruskin, who in his writings extensively explored the artist’s grasp of the ‘truths’ of architecture, geology, the sea, the sky and the other principal components of a landscape or marine picture.

      In order to create idealised 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’.

      Richmond Hill

      c. 1825

      watercolour, 29.7 × 48.9 cm

      Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, Cheshire

      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:

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