“I am the great lion of the day…”
“ … The man who beyond all doubts is the greatest of the age; greatest in every faculty of imagination, in every branch of scenic knowledge; at once the painter and poet of the day…”
John Ruskin
(Reminiscences of J.M.W.Turner’s exhibition at Moscow State Museum of Fine Arts, 2008-2009)
Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775 – 19 December 1851) was an
English Romantic landscape and seascape painter and watercolourist, whose style is said to
have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Turner has always been considered a
controversial figure, and this controversy is undoubtedly characteristic of his creative
activity. Perhaps, it is best expressed by Henri Matisse: “Turner lived in a cellar.
Once a week he had the shutters suddenly flung open, and then what incandescence! What
dazzlement! What jewels!”
In fact, all his works, to a varying degree, are based on contrasts – suffice to drop a glance at his magnificent picture, Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812), one of the exhibition’s jewels. It’s difficult to describe this work more precisely than Michael Palin, famous actor, writer and traveler, did it: “This is a work full of contrasts. The black cloud arches over a sunlit valley, a trick of the weather creating an awesome portal ahead of Hannibal’s army. The sun whose power illuminates the Promised Land shrivels to a sickly mustard-coloured disc when shrouded by the storm cloud. Cheering soldiers are juxtaposed with scenes of rape and looting. It appears to be a celebration but in fact it is a warning. A caution against overwhelming pride, a reminder that whatever mankind may do, the elements will have the last word. We are the servants of nature, never its master.”
Incidentally, the stormy backdrop of Hannibal Crossing the Alps is reputed to have been inspired by a storm over Otley’s Chevin in Yorkshire while Turner was staying at Farnley Hall. This is exactly where Walter Ramsden Fawkes, his close friend and supporter, resided. Turner first visited Otley in 1797, aged 22, when he was commissioned to paint watercolours of the area. He became so attracted to Otley and the surrounding area that he returned time and time again.
His biography, too, is full of contrasts. Commonly known as “the painter of light” and the sea (with all its various moods, whether tranquil or stormy), he was born in one of the most densely populated, darkish and not very hygienic districts of old London in Maiden Lane, not far from Covent Garden. His father, William Gay Turner was a barber and a wig maker. His mother, Mary Marshall, became increasingly mentally unstable, perhaps in part due to the early death of Turner’s younger sister, Helen Turner, in 1786. Mary Marshall died in 1804 after having been committed to a mental asylum in 1799.
Possibly due to the load placed on the family by these problems, the young Turner was sent to stay with his uncle on his mother’s side in Brentford in 1785, which was then a small town west of London on the banks of the River Thames. It was here that he first expressed an interest in painting. A year later he went to school in Margate on the north-east Kent coast. By this time he had created many drawings, which his father exhibited in his shop window.
He entered the Royal Academy of Art schools in 1789, when he was only 14 years old, and was accepted into the academy a year later. Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy at the time, chaired the panel that admitted him. A watercolour of Turner’s was accepted for the Summer Exhibition of 1790 after only one year’s study. He exhibited his first oil painting in 1796, Fishermen at Sea, and thereafter exhibited at the academy nearly every year for the rest of his life.
The sea was the subject that, more than any other, preoccupied Turner throughout his career. Crucially, Turner’s interest in the sea was often a means of focussing on issues of nationalism at a time when the English Channel represented the only barrier against the military ambitions of France. Turner’s images also contain incidents which reveal much about those who earned their living from fishing or smuggling. And this is essentially true of Fishermen at Sea, presented at the exhibition in Pushkin Museum. However, his painting inspired by the journey to the Isle of White, was created under a strong influence of Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), and stands in a class by itself on the more hectic background of Turner’s creative work of the period. Joseph Wright was notable for his use of Chiaroscuro effect, with an emphasis on the contrast of light and dark, and for his paintings of candle-lit subjects. This happened to be just a temporary influence on Turner who later shook everybody’s imagination with his unthinkable of, chaotic, crazy use of light in his works…
Only in his early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), Turner managed to remain true to the traditions of depicting English landscape. However, in Hannibal Crossing the Alps an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects. One popular story about Turner, though it is likely to have little basis in reality, states that he even had himself “tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama” of the elements during a storm at sea.
Turner travelled widely in Europe, starting with France and Switzerland in 1802 and studying in the Louvre in Paris in the same year. He also made many visits to Venice. As he grew older, Turner became more eccentric. He had few close friends except for his father, who lived with him for thirty years, eventually working as his studio assistant. His father’s death in 1829 had a profound effect on him, and thereafter he was subject to bouts of depression. He never married, although he had two daughters by Sarah Danby, one born in 1801, the other in 1811.
He died in the house of his mistress Sophia Caroline Booth in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea on 19 December 1851. He is said to have uttered the last words “The sun is God” before expiring. At his request he was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral, where he lies next to Sir Joshua Reynolds. His last exhibition at the Royal Academy was in 1850.