The Rise Of Landscape Painting

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

As Turner altered his style of oil painting, so also he revolutionized his practice in water color. Originally, in common with the older members of the Early English Water Color School, Turner began a drawing by laying in the gradations of light and shade with grey or some other neutral tint, and afterwards represented te hue of each object by tinting it with color; but this he found resulted in a certain heaviness of aspect. Accordingly, in his later water colors he proceeded to treat the whole surface of his drawing as color, using at one the pigments by which the scene might most properly be represented. By delicate hatchings he achieved wonderful qualities of broken hues, air tints, and atmosphere, so that the view when finished glowed and sparkled with the brilliance of Nature’s own colors. This method of putting on the color direct, without any under-painting of the subject in light and shade, has been to a great extent the foundation of modern painting.

Determined to outshine his fellows, Turner had a habit, dreaded by other artists, of coming to the Academy on Varnishing Day armed with his paint box, and putting a brilliant touch or two on his own canvas when necessary to heighten its effect if its brilliance happened to be in any way challenged by that of a neighboring picture. The brightness of the yellows and reds in his ‘Fighting Temeraire being Towed to her Last Berth’ is said to be due to after-touches put on to ‘kill’ a highly colored painting by Geddes which hung near it in the Academy of 1839. Towards another landscape painter Turner was merciless, but he had respect and kindly feeling for Sir Thomas Lawrence, and on one occasion he darkened a landscape of his with lamp-black because it injured the effect of pictures by Lawrence on either side.

As he grew older, and particularly after his visit to Venice in 1832, Turner became more and more ambitious of realizing to the uttermost the fugitive radiances of dawn and sunset. Light, or rather the color of light, became the objective of his painting, to the exclusion of almost everything else, and few of his contemporaries could follow him as he devoted his brush more and more to depicting the pageant of the heavens. His work when exhibited was severely criticised and held up to ridicule and mirth by Thackeray and other wits; he was regarded as a madman and accused, as other artists after him have been, of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.’ Even ‘The Fighting Temeraire,’ which seems to us so poetic today in its contrast of moonlight with sunlight, to match the contrast between the sailing ship that was passing away and the steamer that heralded the future, even this work was deemed to be exaggerated and extravagant, and to most of the admirers of his earlier pictures paintings like ‘The Approach to Venice’ were utterly incomprehensible.

Fortunately, Turner was now independent of patrons and could paint as he liked. During the earlier part of his career he had amassed a considerable fortune, a great part of which was derived from the engravings of his works, for he was a good business man, able to retain an interest in his works. He had commenced in 1808 the series of etchings known as the ‘Liber Studiorum,’ and the excellence of these plates—now of great rarity and value—had led to his employment as an illustrator, and his fame was greatly increased and extended by the beautiful work he did for books like Roger’s Italy and Poems, The Rivers of France, Southern Coast Scenery, etc. He had a fine studio at what is now 23 Queen Anne Street, and he also owned a house at Twickenham, where he lived with his father, who had retired from business and made his home with his son from about 1807 till his death in 1829. Here, with his father and an old housekeeper, Turner led a retired life; but though habitually taciturn and reserved, he could be jovial at a convival gathering of artists which he now and then attended.

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