Joseph Mallord William Turner

1775 - 1851

Fallacies of Hope: An Artistic Journey to Abstraction

A Presentation by
Samantha C. Stancliffe

April 19, 2017

On December 19, 1851, Joseph Mallord William Turner died. His passing was

surrounded by turmoil and confusion on the part of the public to whom he had exposed his work

for the past sixty years. While Turner had been highly acclaimed and had enjoyed great fame and
pursuit during most of his life, the decade or so leading up to his death had treated him

differently. His latest works had begun to give rise to severe criticism and even some speculation

about the state of the artist's mental health. His death occurred practically unbeknownst to the

public, in circumstances that only served as further fodder to feed the general ill opinion about

him, and those people who wished to defend him were put to considerable trouble to rescue his

teetering reputation. Yet now, more than a century and a half after Turner died, his paintings and

sketches are not only still admired by many critics of the Romantic time period, and his place as

the most important English Romantic artist indisputably granted, but he is even credited with

being with responsible for opening the door to the abstraction and impressionism that defines

most of modern art. His work continues to give us endless food for thought and while much of it

may indeed excite our admiration of his incredible skill as an artist, some of it remains a mystery,

and quite indecipherable to us. Who was Joseph Mallord William Turner?

Turner was born in 1775, in London, the son of William and Mary Turner. He was more

fortunate than many aspiring painters, for his parents were acutely aware of their son's

exceptional talent early on and he was encouraged to cultivate it. His father displayed Turner's

early work in his barbershop and the boy sold his first painting when he was a mere twelve years

old. Turner entered the Royal Academy of Art when he was fourteen years old and his first

watercolor was displayed at the Royal Academy Exhibition at the startlingly young age of

fifteen. Throughout his life, Turner would prove himself to be extremely ambitious, his concern

always to surpass those who had come before him, and he would remain devoted to his work to

the absolute exclusion of everything else including marriage and family.

At just eleven years old, Turner produced his Street in Margate, a painting that serves as

an early display of a remarkable talent that Turner would spend years developing. Already we

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can see aspects that were destined to remain forever a part of his work, like the ships and harbor

and the limitlessly receding sky. The work is comparatively simple in composition, of course, but

a marvelous early testament nonetheless. Turner spent a great deal of time in Margate during his

life, experiencing both joy and suffering there, and the influence of the views he experienced

appears again and again in his work.

Turner cultivated a love of travel from a very young age, both because he enjoyed the

freedom it brought and because it offered him an opportunity to see new places and exposed him

to new views and landscapes. In 1792, he made a journey to Tintern Abbey and painted a

watercolor of it. The incredibly intricate detail is astounding for an artist not yet twenty, and the

play of light and color displayed here is something that Turner would use and perfect for the rest

of his life. It is interesting to examine this work with the words of the poet William Wordsworth

in mind:

For I have learned to look on nature

Not as in the hour of thoughtless
Youth; but hearing oftentimes the
Still sad music of humanity, not
Harsh nor grating, though of ample
Power to chasten or subdue.1

Wordsworth would not pen his poem until six years after Turner painted Tintern Abbey, but there

is something peculiarly appropriate about these lines. Although Turner was only seventeen,

arguably still a "thoughtless youth", his grasp of technique shows a mastery far beyond his years,

as if he had indeed "learned to look on nature hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of

humanity."

1 William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. 1798.

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 Turner's ambition made him keenly aware of the fact that he needed to stand out among

all other artists in England, and to further his marketability he began experimenting with a new

medium: oil painting. The Watermill is his earliest oil. Although, like his Street in Margate, it is a

relatively simple painting, this first dabbling in oil painting would lead him to astonishingly

complex constructions later on.

Westminster Abbey, another superb execution of detailed perfection, is done in watercolor.

The ever-important place of light as it pours through an unseen window dramatically contrasts

the darker shadows of the right side of the Church and the foreground. Interestingly, Turner

inscribed his own name and birthdate on the stone that lies in shadow; perhaps a telltale hint of

the melancholic trend that always overshadowed his work. Turner was no stranger to suffering;

he experienced the death of siblings and the rejection of a young lady when he was still quite

young and his work always displayed a level of pessimism at the fragility and pettiness of human

life. He was also working in a time when artists were striving to portray the concept of the

"sublime", defined by Edmund Burke as "obscurity, darkness, power, vastness, and infinity,

anything that generated feelings of fright, terror, being overwhelmed, and awe."2 The sublime

comes through poignantly in nearly all of Turner's work.

Another early oil painting, Fishermen at Sea, was displayed at the Academy in 1796 and

exhibits Turner's exceptional adeptness at mastering a new and complicated medium. It also

testifies to the artist's seemingly never-ending task of seeking and perfecting his own style. In his

oils, we behold a Turner that could never have come through in his watercolors. It is really the

ocean, which figures prominently in much of his work and is at its best when done with oil

paints, that makes us see the new Turner. He was able to capture in an eerily accurate manner the

2 Janson, History of Art (London: Lawrence King Publishing, 2016), 790.

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unfathomable depths of the sea and this, taken together with the magnificent rendering of the

sky, gives the viewer a sense of awe-inspiring limitlessness. The light cast by the full moon

above the boat reveals to us the great spatial expanse of the sky and sea simultaneously as the

clouds part to direct the eye to a far distant point and the pale light illumines the watery deep.

The coloring of the water convinces the viewer that it is entirely plausible that he could touch the

painting and get wet. The impenetrable blackness of the surrounding atmosphere captures a true

sense of the sublime that was certainly Turner's intention, while the small lamp on the boat that

just barely illumines the sailors reminds us of man's insignificance in the face of nature. This

painting firmly established Turner's reputation as a master of oil painting. Critic Anthony

Pasquin said of it: "We do not hesitate in affirming that this is one of the greatest proofs of an

original mind."3

In 1797, Turner met one of England's most distinguished physicians, Dr. Thomas Munro.

Dr. Munro was an enthusiastic amateur artist and organized what came to be known as an

informal academy for aspiring artists. Turner was among those who enjoyed the doctor's

hospitality and he spent many hours applying watercolor to pencil sketches, a practice which

honed his own skill as a watercolor painter even while he continued to work in oil. Tivoli is one

of his works from this time, a work of elaborate scale and vast landscape, two very typical

Turner elements. Dr. Munro would remain friends with Turner and one of his earliest and most

impactful benefactors.

Caernarvon Castle, a 1799 watercolor, is remarkable for showing how Turner was highly

influenced by the artist Claude Lorrain. This was Turner's first conscious attempt to imitate the

great landscape artist and it was deemed a great success. The painting was exhibited at the Royal

3 Andrew Wilton, Turner in His Time (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006), 28.

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Academy and then purchased by a patron for a far more hefty sum than Turner had originally

planned to ask. I will discuss the important influence of Claude in a moment.

Although Turner's expertise was definitely in the realm of landscapes and portrayals of

nature, he was also adept at drawing people, and human figures remained a part of his work until

the end of his life. His Holy Family was painted in oil and was done as an exercise in imitation of

Titian. The colors are quite vibrant, from the clear blue of the sky to the red and olive coloring of

Mary's garments. The Christ Child radiates light from His person and the snowy white robe on

which He lays markedly contrasts the darker colors in the background, out of which a serpent

menacingly slithers.

Another example of Turner's people is his Venus and Adonis. Somewhat reminiscent of

the flirtatious style of the Rococco, the colors are lavish and rich, the body of Venus certainly

influenced by the nudes of the Renaissance, particularly those of Boucher, of which Turner had

made a careful study. This work was executed at a time when Turner was involved in an

illegitimate relationship with a woman who eventually bore him two daughters. It was one of the

darker sides of Turner's personal life, a time when the figure studies of his pencil produced an

eroticism which art historian Andrew Wilton actually calls "pure pornography."4 Perhaps it is a

good thing that Turner focused primarily on landscape painting.

Since he loved to travel and he was always seeing new places, Turner returned again and

again to marine subjects. He himself was an experienced sailor and ocean scenes held a

particular fascination for him, perhaps because the sea is an incomparable tool for conveying the

terror of nature. His Shipwreck is more dramatic and tense than Fishermen at Sea, as it is

ultimately portraying something disastrous. Again, we are called to marvel at the skill which
4 Ibid., 84.

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brings to the canvas a scene of such tangibly awful events. The viewer feels that if he looks long

enough, the turbulent waves will suck him in or he may actually become seasick. The painting

literally swirls with violent action, the white and gray-green pigment heightens both the power of

the water and the desperate situation of the sailors on board the boat. Turner has managed to

convey both the immense vastness of the landscape as well as the minute, intricate details of the

soon to be dead men. On the left we can glimpse the wreckage which makes us viewers of a

moment in action: the sea has already claimed its victims and will soon demand more. The

contrast of the white water and ship's sails against the black sea and sky brings us even further

into the depth of this work. Once again, the Romantic sense of the sublimity of nature could not

be more apparent.

In 1802, when travel between England and France became a viable option thanks to

Napoleon's influence, the English people flocked in droves to see and taste the wonderful

pleasures of Parisian life. Ever the outlier, Turner did not travel directly to Paris with the rest of

his countrymen. Instead, he chose to make his way there via a route that was considered nothing

short of treacherous: the passage through the Alps. In the company of a single companion, Turner

executed his feat. He made numerous sketches during his travel, of course, but the most

memorable relic from that journey is surely the painting that he produced ten years afterward,

Hannibal and Army Crossing the Alps. Perhaps even more important than the influence of his

travels was that this painting inaugurated a series of Carthaginian subjects which found their way

to Turner's canvas. Some have speculated that the artist was keenly aware of similarities between

the Carthaginian wars and the French revolution, and especially between Hannibal and

Napoleon. Thus, this painting most likely had some political significance as well. In any case,

our examination of it yields to our sensibilities another masterful portrayal of nature. On the left,

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we see men cowering in the face of an oncoming storm, while below on the right, a village is

being plundered to secure supplies for Hannibal's vast army. It is interesting to note the circular

motion of the painting: it begins in the corner where the soldiers are ransacking the town, and

follows the light up to the point where even the savage destruction of the human race must pale

in comparison with the dread force of nature. As the clouds darken, they threaten to swallow the

whole landscape, the motion driving away what little blue sky remains and wrapping the men

below in its awful embrace. When this painting was exhibited, Turner published a few lines from

a poem to accompany it:

Craft, treachery and fraud Salassian force,

Hung on the fainting rear! Then plunder seizd
The victor and the captive, Saguntums spoil,
Alike became their prey; still the chief advancd
Lokkd on the sun with hope; - low, broad, and wan;
While the fierce archer of the downward year
Stains Italys blanchd barrier with storms.
In vain each pass, ensanguind deep with dead,
Or rocky fragments, wide destruction rolld.
Still on Campanias fertile plains he thought,
But the loud breeze sobd Capuas joys beware!5

Given Hannibal's ultimate defeat and the fact that the great general is barely visible in the

painting at all, if there is a political statement to be taken into account here, we might safely

assume that Turner was either opposed to the Napoleonic wars, or had no hope for their success.

Certainly Turner's obsession with the sublime also figures hugely in this work.

As I mentioned earlier, Turner was particularly moved by the work of the French Baroque

artist Claude Lorrain. It was a fascination shared by many painters in England and the

opportunity to see some of Claude's work firsthand, albeit through an illegal purchase, attracted a

great multitude of them. Turner made an intense study of Claude, sketching as much of his work

5 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Fallacies of Hope (1812)

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as he could get access to, and wholeheartedly despairing of ever being able to imitate him.

Claude became an idol for Turner and his works after this point are very reflective of Claudian

influence. In 1815, Turner painted his Rise of the Carthaginian Empire, a work striking in its

Claude-like presentation and technical scheme. Most notable is Turner's use of the sun as the

center-point from the which the light flows, and toward which the eye of the viewer is directed.

The light falls in three lines, to the left group of people, to the stone walls of the building, and

straight down to cast its liquid reflection on the water of the sea. Looking at this painting side-

by-side with Claude's Embarkation, the similarities become apparent. Turner's sun is slightly

more hazy and Claude's overall composition is more clean-cut, but the influence is unmistakable.

Turner is said to have wept upon seeing the Embarkation for the first time, thinking that he could

never produce anything like it. However, many critics insist and the human eye testifies that in

fact he accomplished something equally marvelous. As we saw in Caernarvon Castle, he had

already begun to imitate Claude, perhaps unconsciously, and once he actually beheld the artist's

work, it gripped him and never let go.

As we advance toward the later era of Turner's life, we find the particularly tragic

painting of the Field of Waterloo, depicting weeping women cradling fatherless babies in their

arms as they search the ravaged corpses to recover lost husbands and sons. The horrors of wars

would have been very real for Turner as he lived through the bloody Napoleonic wars and

doubtless this painting would have rung equally moving and significant with those who viewed

it.

Death on a Pale Horse appears quite startling and morbid even for Turner. It is painted in

such a way as to invoke Turner's later style, which I will discuss in a moment. There is some

speculation that this painting is actually incomplete, but whatever the case may be, it takes the

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concept of the sublime to its extreme and horrifying end. It was also painted around the time

Turner's father died; his mother had passed away in an insane asylum some fifteen years before.

It seems plausible that his parents deaths could have influenced the painting, although the

composition is a rather less than attractive memorial.

Now at last we come to one of Turner's most well-known paintings, The Slave Ship. This

painting is vastly important for a couple of reasons. First, it marks the relative beginning of a

completely different Turner, the abstract style for which he is actually best known today. I'll go

into more detail about this arguably unfortunate turn of events in a moment when I show you

more of his last ten-year period. A second reason for the significance of this painting is the

subject matter it deals with. The work depicts one of the worst aspects of the brutal and inhuman

practice of slavery. Turner's Claudian sun is hazy and hidden by the clouds of an oncoming

typhoon. In order to preserve the ship, the slavers have thrown overboard the sick and dying

slaves. The angry sea swallows up its victims as their manacled hands and feet rise pathetically

to the surface as if crying out for help and mercy. Meanwhile, the monsters of the deep approach

to devour the castaways. The slave ship sails away, unconcerned about the human wreck and its

wretched fate. The captains of slave ships were of course aware, as was Turner, that the

insurance would compensate for cargo lost at sea, but not for the slaves lost to sickness. Thus the

treacherous lure of money was a significant motivation for the cruelty shown in this picture. At

the time of its completion and exhibition, the slave trade had been abolished in England for

seven years, but the fight still continued on a global level. Something that adds to the profound

layers of meaning in this painting is the fact that Turner himself had previously made significant

investments in the Jamaican slave-trade, and it was frequently the money from similar

investments that enabled his patrons to pay high prices for his art. We must wonder if Turner was

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haunted by these memories. Perhaps this painting was an attempt to expose the horrors of human

exploitation to the world? There was also, as in all of his paintings, the over-arching message of

all men's fleeting existence, concretely brought home by the verses he published with his

painting:

Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;

Yon angry setting sun and fierce edged clouds
Declare the Typhons coming.
Before it sweep your decks, throw overboard
The dead and dying neer heed their chains.
Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!
Where is thy market now?6

The Slave Ship may have begun Turner's later style of painting, but it certainly did not

end there. Turner pursued his new style during the last ten or so years of his life, becoming more

and more abstract. It is difficult to comment intelligently or coherently on this aspect of his work,

since it was entirely unlike anything that had preceded it, and seemed to fall, quite literally "out

of the blue". Michael Bockemuhl contends that Turner was attempting to convey pure experience

in his later work, experience that could only be understood by looking at the painting. He says:

"Ultimately they [his paintings] eluded even his own attempts to interpret them verbally. Even

he, as their painter, could experience their message solely via the observation of the pictures

themselves."7 Myth and riddle figure prominently in the paintings from this period, leaving us

with a seemingly unresolvable viewing experience.

Let's look at The Snowstorm as an example. This was a painting done after Turner had

spent four hours lashed to the mast of a ship from which he watched an actual snowstorm. The

swirling mass of colors gives the impression of a generally chaotic scene, and the sail of the ship

6 Ibid.

7 Michael Bockemuhl, Turner (Los Angeles: Taschen, 2011), 55.

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has been reduced to thin white shreds that wave and recede, gradually disappearing into the

whole color scheme. There is an absence of order and symmetry here, something that was not

only unheard of previous to this time, but also still considered unacceptable. Although in the

present day there are critics bending over backward to defend Turner's art and offer various

interpretations of it, in his own day his defenders were few and far in between. His work during

the last period of his life was subject to severe criticism and even mockery. The endless list of

ways in which any given painting could be interpreted and the clear lack of any definite meaning

was not perceived then, as it is now, as a positive thing, a sign of the artist's "creative" powers.

This new form of art disgusted the English public and caused people to wonder if Turner had

indeed lost his mind. It is without question that his late work strongly threatened to compromise

his so far brilliant reputation, and it is a sure sign of how far we have come that these days his

abstract style is precisely why he is so well-known and faithfully remembered.

The question of why he chose to go this way and what drove him to abandon everything

that preceded him is difficult to answer. He was certainly intentional in doing this; he was a man

who had always followed his own muse and there is no reason to suppose that changed in his

later life. After having spent all of his painting career seeking to develop his own style, imitating

other artists and ambitiously bent on out-performing all of them, perhaps this conclusion of the

Turner saga only makes sense. For in this abstract and impressionistic style, he was truly his own

phenomenon and this is what he wanted. Perhaps his own words are pertinent in this context: "I

did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like...but no one

had any business to like the picture."

The Visit to the Tomb was the last work that Turner exhibited publicly. A year later, in

1851, Joseph Mallord William Turner died of cholera. His physician and current lover were the

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only people present. The world that had exploded in dismay at the display of his last decade of

work would soon be reconciled to it and, as was his dearest wish, his name would live on and be

known forever in the world of art.

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