Turner and perspective

A post here earlier this month covered the exhibition, David Hockney Painting and Photography, which explores his interest in perspective. Not long after, an appeal arrived from the Ashmolean Museum Oxford to secure for a national collection Turner’s painting, The High Street, Oxford (1810, below).

The Guardian website superimposed Turner’s painting and a photograph of the same scene taken recently by David Fisher (above). The webpage provides a dissolve between the two images and allows a comparison of the photographic perspective and the painter’s.

Please support the appeal!

Late Turner at Tate Britain

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) has been the subject of only two posts here. The first was about the National Gallery show in 2012, Turner Inspired, which examined the influence of Claude Lorrain on Turner’s early work, the second, last month, was about Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner which dramatized the last 25 years or so of the painter’s life. Tate Britain’s The EY Exhibition: Late Turner – Painting Set Free complements the film in looking works from 1835 to the late 1840s. Turner’s reworking of The Wreck Buoy (1849 over 1807, below) was described by his admirer Ruskin as "...the last oil he painted before his noble hand forgot its cunning."

At the risk of being simplistic, a visitor may well conclude that once over 60 and so established in his profession as having nothing to lose, Turner painted as he wanted, undertaking a continuous experiment with colour and form. We see these works through eyes conditioned by impressionism, abstraction and much else that came after him, but that should serve to amplify Turner’s achievements not detract from them. (Richard Dorment in the Daily Telegraph pointed out that Turner’s eye may have been conditioned too – by cataracts and other health problems). Of the two famous works mentioned in the Mr Turner post, the National Gallery has lent Rain, Steam and Speed but not Temeraire, but its absence is more than made up for by Peace - Burial at Sea of the Body of Sir David Wilkie (1842, below top), one of nine square paintings disliked by his contemporaries and now brought together at Tate Britain, and Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water (1842, below lower):

This exhibition provides a welcome opportunity to see a range of Turner’s watercolours, like Norham Castle, Sunrise (c1845, below top) and Heidelburg: Sunset (c1842, below lower):

the three Mount Rigi watercolours of 1842 brought together for the first time, one from Australia: The Red Rigi (1842, below top)

and one of his Margate pictures Wreck on the Goodwin Sands: Sunset (1845, above lower). The National Gallery and Tate Britain’s holdings of Turner’s work are based on the artist’s bequest to the nation, so this exhibition offers a chance to see loans from abroad like The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834 (1835, below), less familiar but of historical interest here and normally in Philadelphia:

Tate Britain has also put on display many of Turner’s note and sketchbooks. The latter emphasise just how intrepid and frequent a traveller he was even in late middle age and at the time before the European railway systems had been established.

Late Turner – Painting Set Free ends on 25 January.

Mike Leigh’s ‘Mr Turner’

This post is a bit late in the day for the UK where Mr Turner went on general release on 31 October. However, I believe the limited US release (outside film festivals) will start on 19 December, so some readers there may find it of interest. 

Mr Turner is a biopic of the English painter JMW Turner (1775-1851), famous for his land and seascapes. I’m no expert on Leigh’s work, but I think that his only other film which is historical, and also biographical, was Topsy-Turvy about Gilbert and Sullivan. This film, set earlier in Victoria’s reign, follows the life of Turner (Timothy Spall, erstwhile Mikado) over the period from not long before his father’s death in 1829 to his own death. Much of the cinematography is sympathetic to Turner’s style and subject matter and the film is as good to look at and as well-acted, as the critics say. Many of the cast are long-term associates of Leigh. How well-founded Spall’s grunting interpretation of Turner may be, as opposed to just idiosyncratic, I can’t say, but it worked convincingly in his relationship with Marion Bailey’s Mrs Booth, Turner’s Margate landlady and companion in his later years.

Leigh’s film is essentially a sequence of vignettes, undated and unlocated, which also offer few clues about some of the characters. Not everyone may know that Turner’s first mistress and the mother of his two unacknowledged daughters was Sarah Danby, a woman 15 years older than himself. Or that his housekeeper was her niece, Hannah Danby, a psoriasis sufferer. Or that his great patron was Lord Egremont of Petworth House in Sussex where Turner, when not abroad, spent most of the 1830s. And there may be other things, for example about John Ruskin, or John Constable and the other eminent painters of Turner’s day or the Pre-Raphaelites who came after them, which it might be helpful to know about before seeing the film, rather than discover them afterwards from Wikipedia or from some of the knowledgeable commentary, not all of it uncritical, which the film has generated. Otherwise the 150 minutes (surely one death bed scene too many) might drag a little. Some background pieces which I liked:

A brush with Mr Turner, in the Guardian by Andrew Wilton, chairman of the Turner Society.

John Ruskin: Mike Leigh and Emma Thompson have got him all wrong, also in the Guardian, by cultural historian and defender of Ruskin, Philip Hoare.

Mr Turner: Recreating the Royal Academy Show of 1832, Amy Raphael’s interview For Christieswith the film’s production designer Suzie Davies. (below)

Impressions of Mr Turner, again in the Guardian, by the film’s researcher, Jacqueline Riding.

I found the portrayal of Turner’s father by Paul Jesson unconvincing, his being only 10 years older than Spall, who looks all of his 57 years, probably didn’t help, and Jesson's Mummersetshire accent might have been more appropriate for Constable’s East Anglian father than Turner’s Devonian one. On a West Country note, anyone searching for the location of Mrs Booth’s house in Ramsgate should instead try the most south easterly part of Cornwall with its views east across Plymouth Sound, not the Channel!

More filmic licence applies in the scene when a clunking link is made between two of Turner’s most famous paintings: The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, (1838 below top) and Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844 or earlier, below lower).

But then Turner never witnessed Temeraire under tow to the breaker’s yard. Pre-release, there was a lot of publicity about the effort Spall made in learning to paint, eg How I became Mr Turner (BBC) and Timothy Spall spent two YEARS learning to paint like Turner in order to play him, (Daily Mail). I don’t recall seeing that much paint being applied, nor am I any judge of the effect all this effort achieved, but Grayson Perry (@Alan_Measles on Twitter on 8 November) certainly is:

Just seen Mr Turner. Very good, but he holds his brush like a shovel and his pencil like a spoon, which disturbed me.

Spall won Best Actor award at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. In France Turner is an exception in being a British painter who is fairly well-known - how much the debt which Monet and the other Impressionists owe to Turner, Constable and Whistler is appreciated is another matter. It will be interesting to see how Mr Turner gets on in the 2015 Oscars.


UPDATE 18 JANUARY 2015

Mr Turner received four Oscar nominations:

Cinematography - Dick Pope
Production Design - Suzie Davies & Charlotte Watts
Costume Design - Jacqueline Durran
Original Score - Gary Yershon

Turner and Claude at the National Gallery, London

In a post last year I commented, after a visit to Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape at the Ashmolean in Oxford, that there were relatively few paintings being shown by comparison with the numerous drawings and etchings (13 vs 125). The National Gallery’s current spring exhibition, Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude, provides an opportunity to see about 10 oils by Claude and 20 by Turner, and the ratio of paintings to other works is better balanced. The theme of the National Gallery (NG) show is Claude’s influence on Turner so the latter’s paintings being in the majority is as to be expected. Also Turner’s paintings are readily available in London, so many having been held by the NG and Tate Britain since his 1856 Bequest.

Joseph Mallord William  Turner (1775-1851) painted 200 years after Claude (1604-1682). But Claude became a major influence after Turner’s first encounter in 1799 with works in the possession of the dealer Angerstein (a collection which later became the kernel of the NG). Turner was impressed by and sought to emulate Claude’s ability to invest an ethereal quality to the light at the beginning and end of the day. An impressive example of this is A View of the Roman Campagna from Tivoli, Evening (below) on loan from the Royal Collection.

Turner left the NG his paintings Dido building Carthage and Sun rising through Vapour: Fishermen cleaning and selling Fish on the condition that they would be hung between two paintings by Claude: Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba and Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca and the exhibition hangs all these pictures in close proximity. Later works by Turner reveal his move away from Claude’s style (though commonalities remained – neither painter cared much for figures in their landscapes, preferring trees and water as subjects) to his later, more romantic and free-flowing style, much admired by the French impressionists, particularly Monet.

Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude ends on 5 June and should not be missed by anyone interested in either of these painters or in the evolution of landscape painting.