20/05/2022
11/09/2022
Curator:
Dr David Blayney Brown, Former Senior Curator, Historic British Art, Tate and independent curator
Location:
Temporary Exhibition Room 1
Related material:
Leaflet (pdf - 1,25 Mb) [1]Leaflet (pdf - 1,25 Mb)
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Turner. Light is Colour is the first exhibition at Museu Nacional to be dedicated to the extraordinary work of British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851). The exhibition is a journey through the artist’s most atmospheric landscapes, bringing together more than 100 paintings, watercolours, drawings and sketchbooks from the Tate collection. During a lecture given in 1818, Turner famously uttered the words ‘Light is therefore colour’, inspiring the title of the exhibition and hinting at the artist’s devotion to capturing this ubiquitous force.
Once dismissed as a minor genre, Turner raised the status of landscape painting to ‘high art’ by defying conventions and incorporating innovative techniques in his depictions of spectacular scenery and environmental conditions. Today, he is widely recognised as the greatest landscape painter of the Romantic period due to his mastery of light, colour and atmosphere, and his situation of human experience in the greater natural world.
From Turner’s early beginnings in the 1790s to his climactic works of the mid to late 1840s, this exhibition explores his fascination with meteorological and atmospheric phenomena. Storms, clouds, rainbows, fogs, fires and the moon were recurring motifs, but the sun was undoubtedly his most beloved subject. This exhibition traces the development of Turner’s compositions from preliminary sketches and exploratory ‘colour beginnings’ to finished watercolours, oil paintings and published prints. The selection reveals how watercolour was instrumental in Turner’s scientific yet intuitive approach and allowed him to capture the intensity of nature’s forces with an unparalleled expressive accuracy.
Turner’s inspiration often came from his travels across Britain and continental Europe. His composite landscapes drew upon a range of sources, including the study of natural sciences, classical mythology, literature, art, poetry, and modern technological invention. Between tradition and innovation, outdoor studies and the studio, nature and the ideal, this exhibition presents the various preoccupations behind Turner’s creations with all their contrasts and paradoxes. Turner’s artworks confront the viewer with a sensory experience of nature that is as affecting today as it was for his contemporaries.
1Memory, Imagination and Synthesis
Turner’s adventures across Britain and continental Europe were a significant source of inspiration for his landscape paintings. Although he preferred to paint indoors in his studio, the line drawings, sketches and watercolours he produced en plein air constituted a fount of stored memories. They were used as notes for imaginative compositions, becoming scenic elements in the final constructed image.
Turner often intertwined past events or mythological tales in his landscapes. One example is The Devil’s Bridge and Schöllenen Gorge, a sketch made by Turner during his travels in the Swiss Alps in 1802. The
original bridge was destroyed during battles between French and Russian troops in 1799.Turner used the rebuilt bridge to visualise the battle scene, adding imagined depictions of small soldiers and pack-mules, dotted
across the chasmic gorge.These help the viewer to perceive the grand scale of the landscape as Turner would have experienced it.
That same year Turner also visited Grenoble. His views and memories of the city, and the bridge across the Isère River, became combined in four colour studies made for a finished watercolour around 1824. The series
illustrates Turner’s painterly process, step by step, from the earliest of the watercolours with its indistinct and dissolved colours,to the last,in which details clearly emerge, saturated with colour.
Turner’s methods of evolving exhibition pictures can be seen in oil sketches of Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus and The Parting of Hero and Leander. These combined memories of Mediterranean scenery, pictures
by Claude Lorrain and Nicholas Poussin, and his reading of classical literature in translation.
2Setting the Scene
The landscapes that form the backdrop of Turner’s history paintings often playan equally important role as the figures depicted in the scene. Inspired by theatre, Turner created a range of ‘backdrops’, from troubled seas and thunderstorms to golden hilltops and serene plains. He used sky, atmosphere and topography as theatrical or emotional effects to evoke distinct moods, which remain as overwhelming to present-day viewers as they were to his contemporaries.
Turner’s subjects are typically referenced in the titles of his artworks, providing a clear context for paintings such as Bacchus and Ariadne or Apullia in Search of Appullus. The figures within these paintings were often mythological in nature, but also included a cast of everyday characters such as farmers, sailors, fishermen and soldiers. Sometimes receiving criticism for showing less regard for accurate figurative representation in his story-based paintings, Turner demonstrated his technical brilliance and mastery of both oil and watercolour through his exemplary depictions of natural elements. He employed pathetic fallacy to convey the story of his paintings as much as he did so through the actions of the characters themselves, meaning the landscape itself played a central role in defining the narrative.
3Facing nature
Turner loved to observe nature first-hand and frequently made studies on the spot, intent on capturing the atmosphere of his surroundings. When passing through the village of Les Contamines on his first Alpine expedition, Turner painted Les Contamines, Dawn: Looking towards St Gervais and Mont Blanc depicting an early morning sunrise before a long day’s trek. The vivid dawn light is a hopeful sign for the day ahead and a useful means of highlighting the scale of the mountain they are about to climb. The figures in the sketch include Turner’s travelling companions and one might be the artist himself.
This room displays a selection of watercolours in which Turner, either literally or symbolically, has centralised himself and his own perspective on the world. Despite the human artefacts that appear in these watercolour studies,they show man as small and insignificant in comparison with the magnificence of nature.
Other works shed light on Turner’s exploration of how humanity has, through the ages, affected and transformed the landscape. Turner observed this on his travels during in the decades shaped by the Industrial
Revolution. Some of Turner’s most atmospheric studies bear witness to the steam, smoke and pollution brought about by industrialisation, prompting new forms of fog and light effects, as demonstrated in his watercolour studies such as A Jetty, ? with a Steamer at Sea in the Distance.
4Light and Atmosphere
Turner claimed that he once tied himself to a ship’s mast during a fierce storm to better paint the event from memory. While he may have invented this story, it does aptly illustrate the artist’s commitment to his work, for Turner knew better than anyone how to capture extraordinary atmospheric effects on canvas.
He travelled extensively across Britain and Europe to directly observe sublime landscapes, from the misty fells of the English Lake District and treacherous Alpine mountains to the hazy Venetian lagoons and endless horizons over Margate.Throughout his journeys, Turner’s sensitivity to light and atmosphere was acute to the point of obsession and the immediacy of watercolour suited his needs well. When developing his watercolour compositions, Royal Academician Joseph Farington wrote that “Turner has no settled process but drives the colours about till he has expressed the ideas in his mind.”
As his career progressed, Turner’s attention to light and to atmosphere took increasing favour over the topographic or scenic elements of his paintings, which, in his later years, became gradually engulfed in light. Some of his more elemental studies of the sea dispense with coastal features entirely, becoming light-filled meditations on the observer’s relationship with the world beyond. This is especially true of his late works, where Turner deliberately blurs details to such an extent that the physical world recedes in favour of a more light-filled,intangible world. Though Turner did not present these studies as finished works, the fact so many remained in his studio with no further embellishment suggests that Turner was satisfied with them in their unfinished and purely atmospheric state.
5Luminous Sublime
This room showcases Turner’s interest in the sublime power of light; its evocative effects and ability to transport the viewer to various emotional states of calm, joy, drama, awe and wonder. In the works, we see how light helps to shape and create the colours that govern how we perceive nature and our surroundings.
Turner’s travels, particularly across the Alps, exposed him to a range of natural and elemental phenomenon, which acted as a catalyst for his artistic developments. Like many of his generation, Turner was inspired by Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime (1757), a work which explored the awe and fear aroused by grand landscapes and nature’s powerful elements. Turner launched his own ‘aesthetic and philosophical enquiry’ through his landscape paintings, from the scenic and historical to the topographical and naturalistic. The presence of the sublime became an important thread throughout Turner’s oeuvre, and in later years took on a more diffuse and abstract expression.
Turner often visited specific places where the light had distinctive and peculiar qualities. In Lucerne,Venice and Margate, for example, the reflective water interacting with the light created what Turner regarded
as a very special beauty. He was set on mastering the effects of light, and his expert yet experimental application of paint enabled him to achieve a convincing luminosity through both his watercolours and oil paintings. These methods included his careful choice of paper, his unique canvas priming method and his technique of repeatedly layering and removing paint to create a blurry effect of dissolution and transcendence.
6Darkness Visible
Based on studies of the colour theories of Isaac Newton (1643–1727) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832),Turner considered light and darkness as equal visual and emotional values in art and nature. The sublimity of light could not exist without the sublimity of darkness, and he often juxtaposed the two for greater impact.
Turner used the colours black or white in their pure forms only sparingly, reserving them for visual and emotional emphasis.A mixture of colours from the entire spectrum, from delicate and bright to sombre, gave him the effects of colour, light and darkness he sought to achieve.
Turner perceived his picturesque compositions as interweavings of light and darkness. In Buttermere Lake, with Part of Cromackwater, Cumberland, a Shower (1798) he uses contrasts to evoke the viewer’s awe at the grandeur of nature. The painting is based on a watercolour sketch that encapsulates the simultaneously quiet and stormy conditions in England’s Lake District, which Turner presumably witnessed in situ. In his sketchbook, he wrote the word ‘black’ on the surface of the lake. Combined with the dramatic lighting effects, the very dark hues supported the dramatic mood of the painting.
From the earliest stages of Turner’s career, the dark sublime is depicted in the form of ominous storm clouds and inky black waters. This black streak runs throughout his oeuvre, often coming into conflict with
man and inspiring fear in the viewer.Towards the end of his career, the sublime embodies increasingly elemental but similarly dark and ominous forms. Turner once said,‘I only wish I had colour to make them blacker’.
7The Sun is God
Prior to his death, Turner is said to have declared ‘The Sun is God’. Though his intended meaning is unknown,the sun undoubtedly occupied a central position in Turner’s oeuvre. It was his most frequently portrayed and beloved subject, the ‘fairest of beings’ or ‘prime cheerer,’as he said.
This section comprises four oil paintings and is intended to be a triumphal finale to the exhibition, immersing the viewer in the glowing light-filled canvases of Turner’s late career.
Turner keenly followed the latest scientific theories relating to light and colour, and he would apply his learnings in his attempts to paint the sun and replicate its energy. He followed the optical experiments of Goethe, whose writings include a study of after-images, the coloured spots produced in the eye by staring directly at the sun.As well as the scientific effects, he was also inspired by the symbolic power of the sun, drawing upon classical mythology and often making reference to the sun in the poetic verse which accompanied the paintings he exhibited at the Royal Academy.
Some scholars have interpreted his suns as self-portraits. In the Romantic era, the artist was often portrayed as a genius with divine creative ability. As this idea was commonly illustrated through the motif of the sun, the
paintings could be seen as a representation of Turner’s creativity as an artist.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Buttermere Lake, with Part of Cromackwater, Cumberland, a Shower, exhibited 1798. Tate: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
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