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Artist J.M.W.Turner 1775 - 1851 Letter from Thomas Uwins dated 3 February 1829. I have fortunately met with a good-tempered, funny, little, elderly gentleman, who will probably be my traveling companion throughout the journey. He is continually popping his head out of the window to sketch whatever strikes his fancy, and became quite angry because the conductor would not wait for him whilst he took a sunrise view of Macerata. 'Dawn the fellow!' says he. 'He has no feeling.'. . . He speaks but a few words of Italian, about as much French, which two languages he jumbles together most amusingly. His good temper, however, carries him though all his troubles. I am sure you would love him for his indefatigability in his favorite pursuit. From his conversations he is evidently near kin to, if not absolutely, an artist. Probably you may know something of him. The name on his truck is, J.M.W. Turner!
Turner's English Towns in watercolour Slideshow (needs Broadband)
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Deal, Kent, 1825, 13 x 24, Private Collection, UK <<<<click to enlarge mouse-over for info |
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Dover from Shakespeare's Cliff, 1825, 16 x 24cm, Private Collection, USA |
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Falmouth Harbour, Cornwall, 1812-3, 15 x 23cm, Lady Lever Art Gallery |
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Hastings from the Sea, 1818, 15in x 23, British Museum |
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Leeds, 1816, 29 x 42cm, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection |
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Margate Kent, 1822, 15 x 23cm, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection |
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Newcastle-on-Tyne 1823, 15 x 21cm Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection |
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Plymouth Dock, from near Mount Edgecumbe, 1813, 15 x 24cm British Museum |
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Portsmouth, 1824, 15 x 22cm, Lady Lever Art Gallery |
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Poole, Distant View of Corfe Castle, Dorsetshire, 14 x 22cm |
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Richmond Yorkshire, 1816, 29 x 42cm, Victoria and Albert Museum |
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Rye, Sussex, 1823, 14 x 23cm National Museum of Wales |
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Scarborough Town and Castle Morning Boys Catching Crabs |
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Stamford Lincolnshire |
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Teighmouth, Devonshire, 1811, 15 x 22cm, Yale Center for Art, Paul Mellon Collection |
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Weymouth Dorsetshire |
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Woolverhampton Staffordshire |
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Whitby, 1825, 16 x 25cm, |
Joseph Mallord William Turner (b. 23-4-1775, d. 19-12-1851, both in London) is probably England's greatest landscape and marine artists. Certainly he was one of the most under appreciated.
Turner was not an easy man to understand, and he did not try to be. Introverted by nature, he became increasingly solitary as the years went by. He never spoke of his mother, who had died insane in a time when the medical profession's understanding of mental illness was scarcely above the witch-doctor stage. He never wed, and he observed such a strict secrecy about his relationships with his two successive mistresses (by which he is known to have fathered at least two children) that it is difficult if not impossible to know what they may have meant to him. His only publicly-acknowledged close relationship was with his father, who became his studio assistant and general factotum for many years and whose death was said to be emotionally devastating to the son.
The few people who got to know Turner well all report that he was a man capable of intense emotion -- a far cry from the cold, unfeeling man that certain biographers would make him out to be. In fact, it appears that he walled himself off from strangers at least partly because of his capacity for such depths of feeling. He may well have feared that, were he to allow anyone and everyone to provoke his emotions so, they would quickly suck him dry and leave nothing but a hollow shell.
Seen in this light, his attitude toward his mother takes on a different, less sinister aspect. Far from being evidence of hatred or contempt, his extreme reticence about her may well have been the result of a love so intense that he could not bear the pain of it. His anger at others' mentions of her may have been a reaction of self-defense against the emotional anguish that the reminders provoked, an anguish that left him vulnerable in a way that threatened his core being.
And what about the accusations that he exploited his father in order to avoid the expense of hiring a studio assistant? We are only now beginning to understand how able-bodied people respond to a retirement of complete idleness. Turner's father was the sort of man who needed activity and a sense of accomplishment to give him purpose in life. After his barbering business failed due to a change in fashions among the rich, helping his son gave him something meaningful to do. Had Turner done what his detractors wanted, he might as well have put his father in the coffin then and there.
In his time he was ridiculed and mocked. Audiences of those times wanted near-photographic realism in the treatment of material objects, not an exploration of the subtle interplay of light and atmosphere. They wanted a magic window onto idealized bucolic scenes, not the artist's visceral reaction to the elemental violence of actual nature.