all across the universe
Would you like to react to this message? Create an account in a few clicks or log in to continue.

JMW Turner

Go down

JMW Turner Empty JMW Turner

Post  eddie Fri Dec 16, 2011 9:15 pm

Avalanche in the Grisons! JMW Turner paints up a storm

Continuing his December-long series of favourite wintry artworks, Jonathan Jones is blown over by the sublime force of JMW Turner's Swiss snowslide – The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 15 December 2011 10.24 GMT

JMW Turner JMW-Turner-The-Fall-of-an-005

The overwhelming power of nature crushes trees and smashes rocks in Turner’s wintry vision of disaster. In the Romantic era when this was painted, artists and poets alike succumbed to the ‘sublime’, the fascination of what scares us. The huge weight of Alpine mountain snow that plummets downwards in this avalanche is sublime; it thrills us with terror. But somehow that seems an inadequate description of this painting’s force. It is a great painting because Turner observes, with almost scientific precision, the way the snow shifts – its mass, acceleration and impact

Photograph: Tate
eddie
eddie
The Gap Minder

Posts : 7840
Join date : 2011-04-11
Age : 68
Location : Desert Island

Back to top Go down

JMW Turner Empty Re: JMW Turner

Post  eddie Fri Dec 16, 2011 9:51 pm

JMW Turner Chichester_canal_jmw_turner
Chichester Canal's vivid colours may have been influenced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815.
eddie
eddie
The Gap Minder

Posts : 7840
Join date : 2011-04-11
Age : 68
Location : Desert Island

Back to top Go down

JMW Turner Empty Re: JMW Turner

Post  eddie Fri Dec 16, 2011 9:54 pm

JMW Turner 800px-Rain_Steam_and_Speed_the_Great_Western_Railway
Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway painted (1844).
eddie
eddie
The Gap Minder

Posts : 7840
Join date : 2011-04-11
Age : 68
Location : Desert Island

Back to top Go down

JMW Turner Empty Re: JMW Turner

Post  eddie Fri Dec 16, 2011 9:56 pm

JMW Turner 797px-Wreckers_Coast_of_Northumberland_Joseph_Mallord_William_Turner
Wreckers Coast of Northumberland, painted ca. 1836. Yale Center for British Art.
eddie
eddie
The Gap Minder

Posts : 7840
Join date : 2011-04-11
Age : 68
Location : Desert Island

Back to top Go down

JMW Turner Empty Re: JMW Turner

Post  eddie Sat Dec 17, 2011 9:05 pm

JMW Turner 796px-Turner%2C_J._M._W._-_The_Fighting_T%C3%A9m%C3%A9raire_tugged_to_her_last_Berth_to_be_broken
The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838 is an oil painting executed in 1839 by the English artist J. M. W. Turner.

It depicts one of the last second-rate ships of the line which played a distinguished role in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, the 98-gun ship HMS Temeraire, being towed towards its final berth in Rotherhithe south east London in 1838 to be broken up for scrap.

A chair made from timbers of the Temeraire can still be seen in the church on the Rotherhithe waterfront.
eddie
eddie
The Gap Minder

Posts : 7840
Join date : 2011-04-11
Age : 68
Location : Desert Island

Back to top Go down

JMW Turner Empty Re: JMW Turner

Post  eddie Thu Jan 12, 2012 10:43 pm

Abbot Hall lays on a northern feast of watercolour by Turner and his friends

Wealthy bachelor Sir Hickman Bacon kept his priceless collection shrouded in drawers to preserve the colours. Now they shine from the Kendal gallery's walls. Alan Sykes is dazzled

JMW Turner Turner-and-his-contempora-005
Turner's The Sarner See; evening, painted in 1842 and one of the treasures of Sir Hickman Bacon's collection. Photograph: Krause & Johansen

Turner and his Contemporaries brings together a rarely exhibited collection built up 100 years ago by Sir Hickman Bacon, and shown in the upstairs galleries of Abbot Hall, which has been championing British watercolours throughout its 50 year history, and which itself has a distinguished collection of works by Turner and some of the other artists represented here.

One of the great pleasures of this exhibition is the chance to see several of Thomas Girtin's works. A dreamy View on the Wharfe, painted during Girtin's visit to Harewood House in 1801 shows cows grazing peacefully in the foreground, with a pillar of smoke rising into clouds settling on the distant hills. Girtin died aged only 27. He was two months older than Turner and the latter acknowledged his contemporary's talent, saying:

Had Tom Girtin lived, I should have starved.

JMW Turner Turner-and-his-contempora-006
Detail from Thomas Girtin's View of the Gate of St Denis, taken from the suburbs c.1802. Photograph: Krause & Johansen

John Sell Cotman's works here are perhaps the most exciting in the exhibition. His New Bridge, Durham, painted at the same time as the ground-breaking Greta Bridge, shows a single arch of the bridge in its gorge surrounded by impressionistic trees in at least 20 different shades of green. His Tintern Abbey by moonlight is a more traditional watercolour, but the effects of the moonlight on the ruins are still delightful.

JMW Turner Turner-and-his-Contempora-004
Peter DeWint's Clee Hills, Shropshire c.1845 Photograph: Krause & Johansen

Sir Hickman Bacon was a wealthy Lincolnshire bachelor landowner, with an estate of over 3000 acres which brought him an income, in the late 19th century, of over £5,000 a year. For about 20 years before the start of the First World War, be devoted a fairly significant part of that income to buying what is now one of the finest watercolour collections remaining in private hands. He bought his first watercolour in 1895, paying around £10 each for a series of works, including ones by Turner and DeWint. At the time, highly finished watercolours by Turner were fetching upwards of £1000, but sketches and less "finished" works could be got for much smaller sums, and it was largely on these that Bacon concentrated – the most he ever paid was £315 for a Turner of Chamonix, bought at the dispersal sale after Ruskin's death.

The largest room is devoted to Turner and painted an almost – but not quite – oppressively dark shade of midnight blue – a shade of blue not that far from a favourite of Cotman's in, for example, Cader Idris. But the colour works – setting off, for example, the bright slither of new moon in River scene with crescent moon and the white bridge in the foreground with its blurry surrounding landscape.

Sometimes an otherwise almost monochrome work can be enlivened by a single splash of colour. In Turner's 1830 A boat and red buoy in a rough sea, the grey and cream of the sea and sky contrast with a small bright flash of scarlet in the foreground – two years later a similar flash of red in a seascape transformed one of his larger paintings at the Royal Academy, and caused Constable to moan:

Turner has been here and fired a gun.

Cotman tried a similar effect – in A figure in a boat on a river, the dark blue and green of the bulk of the picture contrasts with two bright splashes of red in the foreground.

Peter DeWint loved the north and returned here regularly for painting trips. In 1910 he made a sketching tour of Yorkshire, and his wife remembered that:

...he visited this favourite county every second or third year, so that he was familiar with every part of it.

JMW Turner Turner-and-his-Contempora-006
Detail of Richard Parkes Bonington's Fishing Boats in Boulogne Harbour c.1822. Photograph: Krause & Johansen

His Bolton Castle, Wensleydale of about 1839 shows the imposing bulk of the Scrope stronghold surrounded by implausibly high mountains, looking slightly as if it has been transposed to Tuscany.

One reason this collection is so important is because of the extraordinarily well preserved nature of the pictures – so many watercolours have faded over the years by being exposed to their mortal enemy daylight, but Bacon kept his collection shut away in drawers, meaning that the relatively rare times they come out of storage we can marvel at the enduring subtle vividness of Cotman, Turner & Girtin's colouration. There is an excellent catalogue with fascinating articles, sponsored by Christie's.

Turner & His Contemporaries: The Hickman Bacon Watercolour Collection is at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal from January 12 to April 14 2012.
eddie
eddie
The Gap Minder

Posts : 7840
Join date : 2011-04-11
Age : 68
Location : Desert Island

Back to top Go down

JMW Turner Empty Re: JMW Turner

Post  Sponsored content


Sponsored content


Back to top Go down

Back to top


 
Permissions in this forum:
You cannot reply to topics in this forum