The Rise Of Landscape Painting

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

At Dr Monro’s house Turner met John Robert Cozens (1752-99), a most poetic painter in water colors and the son of a water color artist, Alexander Cozens, who died in 1786; and while Turner owed most to his diligent study of Nature, he always owned his obligation to Cozens, who was indeed his immediate predecessor in water color and the first to produce those atmospheric effects which Turner rivalled and excelled.

In 1799, at age of twenty four, Turner was elected as Associate of the Royal Academy and henceforward, surer of himself and his public, he eschewed the merely topographical imitation of landscape for a nobler art. He looked beyond the mere details to a larger treatment of Nature, seizing all the poetry of sunshine, and the mists of morn and eve, with the grandeur of storm and the glow of sunset. In feeling his way to this period of his first style Turner looked not only to Nature but also to the example of his great predecessors, Claude Richard Wilson, and the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. The influence of the Dutch School, and particularly of Van de Velde, is apparent in many of these early works, even in ‘Calais Pier’, which, painted in 1803, was held by Ruskin to be ‘the first which bears the sign manual and sign mental of Turner’s colossal power.’ Already, however, Turner had improved on Van de Velde, who was never able to interpret weather so truly and vigorously as it is painted in the rolling sea and windy sky of this stimulating sea piece.

The year before this picture was painted, Turner was elected R A (1802), and during the succeeding years he spent much time in traveling, visiting France, Switzerland, Italy, and the Rhine, and producing innumerable water colors, as well as some of his finest oil paintings.

That splendor of the sky, which was to be peculiar glory of Turner, is first indicated in his ‘Sun rising through Vapor’, painted in 1807, and it was possibly because this was the first picture in which he was able to obtain the effect after which he strove most earnestly that he was so attached to this picture. He sold it, but twenty years later, at the De Tabley sale of 1827, he bought it back for £514 10s. in order that he might bequeath this to the nation, together with his ‘Dido Building Carthage’ on condition they should be hung in perpetuity beside Claude’s ‘Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca’ and ‘Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba.’ Conscious of his own powers and confident in the verdict of posterity, Turner was jealous of other painter’s fame, and he was enraged at the way in which English connoisseurs extolled the pictures of Claude while they neglected his own works.

The pictures already mentioned, together with the lovely ‘Crossing the Brook,’ a view near Weir Head, Tamar, looking towards Plymouth and Mount Edgcumbe, also painted in 1815, may be regarded as the chief masterpieces in oils of Turner’s first period. After 1820 a great change was manifest in his manner of painting. In the early paintings dark predominated, with a very limited portion of light, and he painted solidly throughout with a vigorous and full brush; but his later works are based on a light ground with a small proportion of dark, and using opaque touches of te purest orange, blue purple, and other powerful colors, Turner obtained infinitely delicate gradations which produced a splendid and harmonious effect. This new manner is first seen in his ‘Bay of Baiæ,’ painted in 1823, and six years later, in 1829, it is revealed in all its glory in one of Turner’s most beautiful and poetical works, ‘Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus,’ in which, as Redgrave has said, ‘while in no way gaudy, it seems impossible to surpass the power of color which he has attained, or the terrible beauty in which he has clothed his poetic conception.’ In this glorious picture, ‘a work almost without a parallel in art,’ the nominal subject has little more power over us today than it has in the Claudes. Turner’s painting attracts us primarily, not as an illustration to a familiar story from Homer, but as a glowing piece of color, a magnificently decorative transcription of a flaming sunrise. And with all this the picture is a ‘magic casement’ through which our imagination looks out on a world of romance, for in this color is all the intoxication of triumph, of final victory after perils escaped; and though Turner himself probably did not know it, and few who look upon his masterpiece are conscious of the fact, this picture subconsciously expresses the elation, the pride, and even the touch of insolence, that all England felt after her victorious issue from the Napoleonic wars.

The Rise Of Landscape Painting (continued)