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William TurnerFamous English landscape painter
Date of Birth: 23.04.1775
Country:  Great Britain |
Content:
Biography of William Turner
Among English artists, the extraordinary figure of one of the greatest representatives of world art, Joseph Mallord William Turner, stands out. He was only 15 years old when his paintings appeared at the Royal Academy. English painting at the beginning of the 19th century knew several remarkable artists. Constable and Turner became the main representatives of the Romantic movement of that era. The romantics sought to reflect the mysteriousness of the surrounding world in their works. The originality of English Romanticism, characterized by a deep sense of nature, presented not in stillness but in movement, and often accompanied by the presence of a human figure, was most fully manifested in the genre of landscape. Turner was a landscape painter of a completely romantic nature, who managed to grasp the artistic representation of the untamed forces of nature. His bold landscapes, with their coloristic and light-air searches, are distinguished by unusual effects and a colorful phantasmagoria of the forces of nature. His versatile talent, the ability to independently make his way in combination with a deep understanding of the traditions of the old masters, led him to worldwide success, almost impossible for a landscape painter in the 18th century.
Early Life
Turner was born on April 23, 1775, in the heart of the narrow streets of London, on the banks of the Thames. Here, the boy felt the pulse of life in a huge trading city. His father had a barbershop, which was visited by many artists and engravers. Therefore, it was not surprising that Turner's father hung his son's watercolors in the shop and sold them for two or three shillings each when he was only twelve years old. Initially, these were copies of fashionable topographic views of picturesque landscapes, castles, ruins, and architectural landmarks of London. The father did not consider his son's drawing lessons as mere entertainment but as a fairly reliable source of additional income. By the end of the 18th century, topographic sketches were very popular in England, later translated into engravings, illustrating various guidebooks and descriptions. Based on the recommendations of some artists who noticed the talented drawings of the boy, he was enrolled in December 1789 as a free student of the Royal Academy. When Turner was only fifteen years old, one of his drawings was accepted for an exhibition at the academy.
Artistic Development
Turner became close to the circle of Dr. Monro and the best English masters of watercolor, who were passionate about new ideas of "painting the grandiose and majestic landscape". Gilpin's teaching on color harmony, which advised "reducing the entire painting to the main or key tone, which in the landscape should always be taken from a cloudless part of the sky," also had a great influence on Turner. In Monro's house, most of the artists copied the works of old masters, but when Turner wanted to understand the achievements of a certain artist, instead of copying, he painted an original picture in the corresponding style. Gradually, Turner moved from watercolor to oil painting. Turner was determined to achieve recognition and throughout his life, he tried to prove that landscape could express the highest ideas and feelings no worse than historical painting. The first canvas he showed at the academic exhibition in 1796 was the painting "Fishermen at Sea" or "Chomley Marina". It depicts several fishing boats at sea at night. The moonlight pouring through breaks in the clouds illuminates the boat, on which the reddish light of a lantern flickers. In this first oil painting, Turner constructs a restless light oval of the composition and surrounds the moon with a halo of mist. Turner embodied his tragic feeling of the instability of existence in the instability of foaming waves, the collision of sharp diagonals of masts and sails, and the hopelessness of the efforts of people struggling in boats, snatched from the darkness of an approaching storm by a randomly breaking ray. The characteristic oval of the composition is particularly clear in a preparatory drawing with its black mass of a ship capsized on its side and a small boat, which is moving counter to it in the orbit of a huge curved wave, whose white sail is rushing to its death and exactly appealing for help.
Later Work
Turner's further step forward is evident in the painting "Buttermere Lake, with Churche and Lake" shown two years later. Turner tries to express in his paintings the sublime romantic feeling of merging with nature. Perhaps this is why there is an intensified contrast between storm clouds, dark mountains on the sides, and the shining distance of the valley in the center, where a rainbow descends from one end. By the way, the rainbow is reflected in the water, which cannot actually happen since it does not occupy a specific place in space. But Turner was never bothered by incongruities if he needed them in the painting. The artist is very interested in conveying aerial perspective and exploring the delicate gradations of light transitions. Turner had a habit of accompanying the titles of his paintings in exhibition catalogs with quotes from his favorite poets Thomson, Milton, or his own verses. These quotes almost always related to either light or atmospheric phenomena.
The sea, fog, and sun were favorite themes of the artist. In the painting "Sun Rising through Vapour. Fishermen Cleaning and Selling Fish" (1807), these three motifs are combined into a harmonious whole. In his early works, the artist shows a special emotional sincerity, as if they were lyrical fragments of free self-expression. Although the basis of all Turner's compositions - even the late ones, which are reduced to unclear bright phantasmagorias - is a completely well-developed linear drawing, clearly defining not only spatial plans but also each volumetric object.
Turner dreamed of creating a kind of encyclopedia of landscape, showing all the variety of its possibilities and the breadth of the range. He wanted to prove that landscape can evoke various experiences and feelings, giving birth to diverse ideas and images. Turner bravely embarked on the task of creating a hundred compositions encompassing all the varieties of landscape - "historical, pastoral, architectural, maritime, and mountainous". The publication plan was almost complete, with more than a dozen compositions and engravings already prepared, when Turner abandoned all this project. Educated on the aesthetic theories of the Enlightenment era, Turner considered it his duty to respond to the invitation of the academy to give a course on perspective. "The main thing that one must strive for in art is the true understanding of the beauty of nature," he said in a draft of his first introductory lecture. Turner studied nature so carefully, was so devoted to his creations, and was endowed with such a rich imagination that once, while composing the magical painting "The Hesperides Garden" in 1806, he painted his fantastic dragon-guardian in the very form that was found in the remains of an ancient animal (iguanodon). In his lectures, Turner attempted to include everything from Euclid and Pliny to the latest scientific hypotheses, discoveries, and theories of chemists and opticians of the early 19th century, but did not ignore the differences between the laws discovered by science, in particular optics, and the rules applicable to painters. He discussed questions of light, shadow, and the problem of reflections in water, glass, and metals; the relationship between elementary geometric shapes and form in the visual arts; the nature of vision and the structure of the eye; the classification of the three primary colors - red, yellow, and blue - according to their tonal relationships and physiological effects; and color, which he considered the decisive element of painting. Turner was also interested in chemistry and was familiar with the chemist Field, who dealt with the production of paints for artists. And Turner was always interested in the practical application of new scientific positions and discoveries to the process of painting. Turner was acquainted with the most outstanding physicists of his time, Faraday and Brewster. He intuitively anticipated future scientific discoveries. As Kenneth Clark said, "It is precisely the instinctive understanding of the structure of the physical world of our planet, created by the pulsation and infinite interpenetration of waves, that makes Turner so universal and links him to the most outstanding physicists of modern times."
All of this was a real innovation in painting at that time. Turner dared to go against accepted artistic traditions. At that time, everyone firmly believed that every painting should be painted in muted brown colors - to match the darkened varnish on the canvases of the old masters. Art lovers carried a yellow filter called "Claude Lorrain's glass" with them and inserted it into their eye instead of a monocle when looking at paintings, to see them tinted in the golden tones of the old times. Even quite restrained attempts by Turner to convey bright daylight and lighten his palette were the occasion for the derogatory nickname "White Painter". The color white was considered "unpaintable" and was supposed to be avoided in every way. It seemed "too active", "not amenable to discipline and harmony", and "always standing out in tone".
During this turning point, Turner first visited Italy, where he felt primarily the heat, shine, and radiance of the sun and the enlightenment, permeation of Italian nature with light. He spent only about five months in Italy. Turner worked incredibly hard, and he returned to classical subjects. His colors became so bright that Constable was even scared, saying, "Turner has gone mad with his mastery, the painting is done with saffron and indigo!" And Turner himself felt that he still had not achieved the brilliance and dazzling radiance, the intensity of color in southern nature, which was forever sealed in his phenomenal visual memory. He continued to hear and search for ways to express this liberated from convention color symphony internally. Turner gravitated towards the Venetian school, especially Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto.
After his second trip to Italy in 1829, Turner showed his best historical painting "Ulysses Mocking Polyphemus" - the most traditional in terms of subject matter and the most innovative in its interpretation. Polyphemus is a terrible giant cyclops, the son of Poseidon, who lives alone in a cave and tends sheep. During his journey, Odysseus arrives on the island and cunningly blinds Polyphemus. The painting combines ancient mythology with the latest scientific data and specific observations. One of Turner's researchers calls this painting "mythology of color".
The painting depicts Ulysses' ship sailing away from the deceived and blinded Polyphemus. Turner painted smoke rising from the cyclops' mountain, and the enormous figure of Polyphemus, merging with the mountain and smoke, is depicted as a "monstrous growth on a lonely mountain". But the smoke painted by Turner rises not from the shepherds' fires, as described in a free translation, but from the crater of a volcano. Turner sketched not only the eruption of Vesuvius but also exposed his open album for the "volcano to sign it" with hot ash. Polyphemus' island is volcanic, and he himself, as its organic part, is directly related to the ideas of the elemental forces of nature. According to Hesiod's "Theogony", Polyphemus' brothers, Steropes and Arges, were personifications of thunder and lightning. In the late 18th century, a scientific hypothesis was put forward according to which volcanic ash and lightning during discharges form meteorites. Thunder rumbles during the fall of meteorites. And the sea caves on the left side of the painting, in the depths of which flames are burning, judging by their size, are not the dwelling of Cyclops but possibly embody another theory - Erasmus Darwin's theory, which argued that the origin of volcanoes is associated with the influx of seawater into the fiery depths of the earth. "The Odyssey" says nothing about the sparkling Nereids frolicking around Ulysses' galley. Turner used a popular guidebook for his lectures, "The Art of Painting" by Lairesse, according to which the Nereids should denote "various qualities and effects of water". In this painting, the Nereids with stars on their foreheads probably embody, in Turner's view, the phenomenon of phosphorescence in nature. And in his lectures, he used the famous revolutionary and scientist Joseph Priestley's summary of information about the luminescence of some objects associated with decay and other phosphorescent phenomena in his research "The History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, and Color" (1772). Turner also used this book in preparing for his lectures, as well as the poem "The Botanic Garden" by Erasmus Darwin. It describes the observations of travelers in tropical seas, "when the ship sails as if surrounded by lights and leaves a glowing trail behind it. And if the sea is slightly agitated, each drop glows and shimmers." Another peculiar feature of "Ulysses" is the unique interpretation of the pre-dawn sky. At first glance, the skies, where a wonderful sunrise takes place, are given within very accurate observance. But a careful look will notice that from the place where the luminary appears, an image of rearing horses unfolds like a fan, "outlined by a fiery contour, rising into the sky with flowing manes, surrounded by flashes of purple clouds." Turner took these horses of Aurora directly from the sculpture of the Parthenon pediment. He had plaster casts of the sculptures of the Parthenon at his home on Queen Anne Street. Thus, Turner identified his allegorical horses of Aurora with their prototypes in plastic art. Turner attempted to merge the ideal and the real, to merge the mythological image with the image of the real landscape. And in his other paintings, the figurative structure is usually associated with the clashes and transformations of the elements, especially light and darkness. "Ulysses" by Turner is one of the steps leading to the fusion of history, reality, and imagination in the artistic images of his later works.
"Ulysses" was called melodramatic, an opera setting; it was noted that Ulysses' galley is flooded with sunlight even in those parts where its rays cannot penetrate, and the contrast between the darkness of the Cyclops' cave and the brilliance of the morning sky is too great. But Turner was never bothered by the inaccuracies of a naturalistic order; he boldly increased the sizes of castles or bell towers, moved them where he deemed necessary if the structure of the painting required it, or enhanced the vibrancy of color if he believed that the expressiveness of the whole would benefit. Turner skeptically viewed the possibility of establishing "unshakable," solid laws of color and light for painting.
One of Turner's most interesting works is the large oil painting "Juliet and Her Nurse", shown at the Royal Academy. The painting depicts Juliet with her nurse and highlights the contrast between the youthfulness and innocence of Juliet and the aged appearance of the nurse. The colors and lighting used in the painting help to convey this contrast and emphasize the emotions and relationships between the two characters. The painting is considered one of Turner's masterpieces and showcases his skill in capturing human emotion and relationships in his work.
