Volume 50, Number 20 · December 18, 2003
The Greatest
By Richard Dorment
Turner
by James Hamilton
Random House, 461 pp., $35.00
Turner's Britain
Catalog of the exhibition by James Hamilton
an exhibition at the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England,November 7, 2003–February 8, 2004
London: Merrell, 208 pp., $59.95
Turner and Venice
Catalog of the exhibition by Ian Warrell
an exhibition at Tate Britain, London,October 9, 2003–January 11, 2004; and the Kimball Art Museum, Fort Worth, February 15–May 30, 2004.
London: Tate, 280 pp., £29.99 (paper)
Turner: The Late Seascapes
Catalog of the exhibition by James Hamilton
an exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, June 14–September 7, 2003;the Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, England, October 31, 2003–January 25, 2004; and the Burrell Collection, Glasgow, Scotland, February 19–May 23, 2004.
Yale University Press/ Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 162 pp., $39.95
"The Sun Rising Through Vapour": Turner's Early Seascapes
Catalog of the exhibition by Paul Spencer-Longhurst
an exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, England,October 24, 2003–January 25, 2004.
Third Millennium/Barber Institute of Fine Arts, 72 pp., £12.95 (paper)
J.M.W. Turner was born in London in 1775, the only son of a Covent Garden barber and a mother so unstable that she was to die in a lunatic asylum unvisited and unmourned by her husband and child. A prodigy, Turner first trained as an architectural draftsman before the Royal Academy schools accepted him as a student at the age of fourteen. Although he had little formal education and may have suffered from some form of dyslexia, these very disadvantages, coupled with a powerful intellect and raging curiosity, turned him into a voracious autodidact. At the Academy, he was instructed in the rudiments of his art through the academic practice of drawing first from antique casts, and then from life. The president of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, taught his students to differentiate between the hierarchies in art, from history painting, the most prestigious, on down to landscape, portraiture, and lowly genre scenes. The importance of these teachings for Turner's later artistic development can hardly be overstated. As a landscape painter, Turner absorbed the idea that a great artist idealizes nature, transcending the particular to express a general truth. For Sir Joshua, the purpose of a great work of art was to appeal to the imagination and not simply to the eye. Turner learned to look at art through the lens of old masters such as Claude, Poussin, and Gaspard Dughet.
Review, 4052 words
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