Turner. Eric ShanesЧитать онлайн книгу.
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© Parkstone Press International, New York, USA
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Tate Britain
British Museum, London
Royal Academy of Arts, London
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK
Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, UK
University of Reading, Reading, UK
National Portrait Gallery, UK
Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Foreword
“J. M. W. Turner is the only man who has ever given an entire transcript of the whole system of nature, and is, in this point of view, the only perfect landscape painter whom the world has ever seen… We have had, living with us, and painting for us, the greatest painter of all time; a man with whose supremacy of power no intellect of past ages can be put in comparison for a moment.”
Self-Portrait, c. 1798
oil on canvas, 74.5 × 58.5 cm
Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London
Biography
1775 Birth of Joseph Mallord William Turner in London on 23 April.
1787 Makes first signed and dated watercolours.
1789 Probably begins studying with Thomas Malton, Jr and also admitted as student to Royal Academy Schools.
1790 Exhibits first work at the Royal Academy.
1791 Tours the West Country.
1792 Tours south and central Wales.
1793 Awarded the ‘Greater Silver Pallet’ for landscape drawing by the Royal Society of Arts.
1794 Tours Midlands and north Wales.
1795 Tours southern England and south Wales.
1796 Exhibits first oil painting at the Royal Academy.
1797 Tours north of England and Lake District.
1798 Tours north Wales.
1799 Elected an Associate Royal Academician. Visits West Country, Lancashire and north Wales.
1801 Tours Scotland.
1802 Elected Royal Academician. Tours Switzerland.
1804 Death of mother after a long illness.
1805 Holds first exhibition in own gallery in London.
1807 Elected Royal Academy Professor of Perspective.
1808 Visits Cheshire and Wales. Probably pays first visit to Farnley Hall, home of Walter Fawkes.
1811 Delivers first course of perspective lectures at the Royal Academy. Tours West Country for material for the ‘Southern Coast’ series.
1812 First quotation from his own poem, ‘Fallacies of Hope’, in the Royal Academy catalogue.
1813 Completes Sandycombe Lodge in Twickenham. Revisits West Country.
1814 Again tours West Country.
1815 Tours Yorkshire.
1816 Tours Yorkshire to gain material for the ‘Richmondshire’ series.
1817 Tours Belgium, Germany and Holland.
1818 Visits Edinburgh.
1819 Walter Fawkes exhibits over sixty Turner watercolours in his London residence. Pays first visit to Italy, stays in Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples.
1821 Visits Paris and tours northern France.
1822 Visits Edinburgh for State Visit of King George IV.
1824 Tours south-east England, also the Meuse and Moselle rivers.
1825 Tours Holland, Germany and Belgium. Death of Walter Fawkes.
1826 Tours Germany, Brittany and the Loire.
1827 Stays at East Cowes castle, the home of the architect John Nash. Autumn, starts visiting Petworth regularly.
1828 Delivers last lectures as Royal Academy Professor of Perspective. Visits Italy a second time, stays principally in Rome.
1829 Exhibits seventy-nine ‘England and Wales’ series watercolours in London. Visits Paris, Normandy and Brittany. Death of father. Draws up first draft of will.
1830 Tours Midlands. Exhibits a watercolour for the last time at the Royal Academy.
1831 Tours Scotland. Revises will.
1832 Visits Paris, probably meets Delacroix.
1833 Exhibits 66 ‘England and Wales’ watercolours in London. Visits Vienna and Venice.
1835 Tours Denmark, Prussia, Saxony, Bohemia, the Rhineland and Holland.
1836 Tours France, Switzerland and the Val d’Aosta.
1837 Death of Lord Egremont. Resigns as Royal Academy Professor of Perspective.
1839 Tours the Meuse and Moselle rivers.
1840 Meets John Ruskin for the first time. Visits Venice.
1841 Tours Switzerland, and does so again in following three summers.
1845 Acts as temporary President of Royal Academy. Tours northern France in May; in the autumn Dieppe and Picardy, his last tour.
1846 Moves to Chelsea around this time.
1848–49 Growing infirmity. Revises will.
1850 Exhibits for the last time at the Royal Academy.
1851 Dies 19 December in Chelsea, London.
From darkness to light: perhaps no painter in the history of western art evolved over a greater visual span than Turner. If we compare one of his earliest exhibited masterworks, such as the fairly low-key St Anselm’s Chapel, with part of Thomas-à-Becket’s crown, Canterbury Cathedral of 1794, with a vividly bright picture dating from the 1840s, such as The Falls of the Clyde, it seems hard to credit that the two images stemmed from the same hand, so vastly do they differ in appearance. Yet this apparent disjunction can easily obscure the profound continuity that underpins Turner’s art, just as the dazzling colour, high tonality and loose forms of the late images can lead to the belief that the painter shared the aims of the French Impressionists or even that he wanted to be some kind of abstractionist, both of which notions are untrue.
Folly Bridge and Bacon’s Tower, Oxford
1787
pen and ink with watercolour, 30.8 × 43.2 cm
Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London
The work is a transcription of an image made for The Oxford
Almanack by Michael Angelo Rooker
Instead, that continuity demonstrates how single-mindedly Turner pursued his early goals, and how magnificently he finally attained them. To trace those aims and their achievement by means of a selected number of works, as well as briefly to recount the artist’s life, is the underlying purpose of this book.
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born at 21 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, sometime in late April or early May 1775. (The artist himself liked to claim that he was born on 23 April which is both our national day, St George’s Day, and William Shakespeare’s birthday, although no verification of that claim has ever been found.) His father, William, was a wig-maker who had taken to cutting hair after wigs began to go out of fashion in the 1770s.