Turner and Romanticism: Where the Label Fits and Where It Does Not

What the label claims

Romanticism in British painting is usually identified by a cluster of preferences: wild landscape over cultivated ground, feeling over rule, the sublime over the merely beautiful, and the individual imagination treated as the source of all value. On that description Turner is the central English example, and the case for him is quickly made.

His storms dwarf their human figures, his late canvases abandon the finish the Academy expected, and he attached verse about the fallacies of hope to pictures of armies being destroyed by weather. A survey of the period that did not put him at the centre would be leaving out the obvious candidate.

Where he came from instead

The complication is his training. Turner began as an architectural and topographical draughtsman, colouring prints and working up views for the engraving trade, and that work rewarded accuracy about buildings and coastlines instead of any intensity of feeling. He was a professional supplier of reliable views for years before he was anything else.

That grounding never left him. The thousands of sketchbook pages in the Bequest are dominated by measured, patient recording of specific places, and even his most dissolved late canvases usually start from somewhere he had drawn carefully. The route to his sublime ran through a great deal of unglamorous observation.

The classical commitment

He also spent his career pursuing an ambition the Romantics are supposed to have discarded. Turner wanted landscape admitted to the rank of history painting on the Academy's own terms, and he kept exhibiting classical and mythological subjects long after the fashion had moved on and the pictures stopped selling.

His will makes the point about as plainly as it can be made. He required two of his own canvases to hang beside two by Claude Lorrain, a seventeenth-century classicist, in perpetuity. A painter arranging a permanent comparison with Claude is not straightforwardly a rebel against tradition, whatever the surface of his late work suggests.

The sublime, specifically

Where the label does its real work is on the sublime. Edmund Burke had distinguished the sublime from beauty back in 1757, locating it in vastness, obscurity and a kind of terror experienced from a position of safety, and that analysis describes a great many of Turner's exhibited pictures almost clause by clause.

Avalanches, Alpine passes, ships going down and armies lost in snow are all versions of the same proposition: nature at a scale that overwhelms the observer. Turner did not need to read Burke to arrive there, since the idea was common property by the 1790s, but the fit is exact.

A useful conclusion

Turner is best read as a painter who used Romantic subject matter to advance an essentially academic ambition. The wildness is genuine and so is the classicism, and the pictures are more interesting once both are held in view and not one being treated as the real Turner and the other as packaging.