J.M.W. Turner and The Sea: An Eccentric Loner Charts His Own Course

J.M.W. Turner
Turner & the Sea
Peabody Essex Museum, Peabody, MA
On view May 31, 2014 to September 1, 2014

“By George, this kid can really paint!” many British critics said when they viewed the wild scene of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s early oil painting  'Fishermen at Sea' (1796). Son of a working class barber and a wig maker, his elevation into salons was an unlikely ascent. He began drawing when he was 11, was producing such promising watercolor sketches for architectural firms that he entered the Royal Academy of Art at 14 and was accepted into the academy as a member a year later. And there he was blowing the socks off stuffy English critics at the tender age of 21.

Turner is dead and gone but his sheer brilliance as an artist is blowing the socks off audiences at the Peabody Essex Museum’s “Turner and The Sea.” The show’s a whopper - over 100 works from oils to watercolors, prints and sketches from the beginning to the end of J.M.W. Turner’s fifty years of work.

Turner was an inveterate traveler. He found inspiration along the coastlines of England, traveled widely in Europe, sketching impulsively everywhere he went. He had insatiable curiosity (Turner absorbed Goethe’s theory of light and darkness and depicted their relationship in a number of his paintings, including Light and Colour: Goethe's Theory – the Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis). and studied the work of classic painters in the Louvre.

Turner could do it all.

(A Venetian cityscape by J.M.W. Turner, “Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore.” 1834 (Courtesy Peabody Essex Museum)

If he felt like it, he could render scenes from romantic subjects with classical, biblical, literary sources, landscapes, and ships and ship rigging with great fidelity. For most of his career, that wasn’t what interested him. Most of the artwork here displays his specialty, maritime scenes, the way he conjured them, from British primacy during the Age of Sail to the birth of the era of steam power by the mid 1800s.

If you’ve ever spent a week at the ocean’s edge or traveled by boat, you know that the sea provides endless scenes of beauty, power, color, and light. Turner spent his life combining those elements with his vision of how we mortals fit into its vicissitudes.

To show just how far from the beaten path Turner’s conceptions of maritime art were from his peers, the exhibit includes work by his contemporaries.  His peers, including John Constable and Americans Frederic Edwin Church, Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, have solid technical skills, producing great realistic renditions of ships, harbors, seascapes and the like.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, “Staffa, Fingal’s Cave” (1831-1832) Photo: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

By contrast, Turner’s work became looser, less constructed, and way more visceral. With his swirling brush technique and indistinct evocation of subject matter, he painted what he wanted you to feel. Others painted what they want you to see.

"I did not paint... to be understood. I wished to show what such a scene was like," Turner said. An eccentric loner, first rate showman and keen competitor, he was an Impressionist before the term was created later in the 1800s. His treatment of ominous ocean waves, breakers, and sea foam puts him in a class by himself. You could see it coming from his that first oil painting in 1796.

The J.M.W. Turner exhibition is spread over six rooms on the second level is divided into seven thematic sections:

The seven explanatory panels for each section are useful but an exhibit of this size deserves more information for the spectators. No headsets with background information are offered. The one tour I followed with a docent did little more than echo what was written in the explanatory panels in each room (other docents may or may not be more prepared).

There were a couple of iPads in several rooms but considering the huge interest in the show, not nearly sufficient for those of us accustomed to headsets or larger computer stations to enhance the experience. No photography (even with no flash) is allowed in the exhibit.

Turner’s treatment of sunlight, rain, and fog, especially during storms, is astonishing. Several of his paintings at the sunset of his career are atmospheric impressions. And I felt them.

Snowstorm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth 1842; Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 122 cm

Pay attention to the items in the glass cases in the exhibit. Turner’s notebook sketches show his desire to capture mood by experimenting with watercolors. By the end of his career, Turner had churned out 300 oil paintings and 20,000 sketches and watercolors, including 300 sketchbooks. This exhibit contains less than 0.005% of his output! The man lived and breathed his art.

If you visit, here are several websites to read or bookmark in your iPhone.
Peabody Essex Museum press release
http://www.pem.org/press/press_release/265-pem_presents_turner_the_sea

Sebastian Smee of The Boston Globe at his best…
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2014/06/14/turner-maritime-impressions-flood-senses-salem/ypya2SnIL8oRZ9LUDsXO9O/story.html

and of course, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._W._Turner

 

Comments

[Bill Ives]

Great review. We saw the exhibit in July and I got the catalog.

[Bill Ives]

Turner was a real innovator. But it was interesting to leaner that this was driven by his business concerns to stay different from his peers.

[Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. aka pt at large]

He was a competitor and innovator. When his peers began to emulate his style, he pushed himself to find new techniques to portray his experience of light, color, motion. His explorations kept him at the fore of landscape and marine artists during his lifetime. I read that he was eccentric, kept most of his paintings, lived as with his father for thirty years, had two mistresses who bore him children, and never allowed anyone to watch him as he painted. This in spite of the fact that he craved and prized his popularity during hi lifetime.

[Susan Lyman]

What a coincidence I am bound to get up there before 9/1 others have been just raving about it in the past few days !!!

[Bill Pignato]

Hi Paul
Thanks for the review, this has been on our list. Also a reminder that it ends September 1.