FEATURES ARCHIVE

This choice group of watercolours by Turner represents the artist in a wide range of aspects. The early years of learning and experiment (never less than stimulating) are here expressed in a small Lakeland subject that embodies many of the formative influences on his art, and the apogee of his achievement is present in one of the grandest and most visionary of his late Swiss subjects. His lifelong use of sketches made on tour as the forcing-houses of an unparalleled technical mastery is demonstrated in two very different studies, one a view on the Rhine in bodycolour on blue paper, the other a ‘roll’ sketchbook page of marvellously economical power, from one of his last continental journeys. As a most unusual bonne bouche, the group also includes an erotic study that takes us to the enigmatic heart of the private man.

The little watercolour of Skiddaw and Bassenthwaite Lake from Newlands is an unusually highly worked and expressive example of Turner’s collaboration, as a young man, with his great contemporary Thomas Girtin. Born in the same year, the two prodigies were, for a short period, the terrible twins of the Romantic revolution in watercolour. During the 1790s they transformed the medium: from being a gentle means of recording topographical and antiquarian subjects it became, in their hands, the vehicle of some of the profoundest ideas ever to have been expressed through landscape. Their partnership was one of aesthetic sympathy and mutually beneficial experiment, but at one moment it had a practical existence in reality: they were both asked by Dr. Thomas Monro, physician to the King and a keen amateur artist, to copy drawings in his own important collection. According to the Royal Academician Joseph Farington, they worked by candle-light on winter evenings, on opposite sides of a single desk, for a reward of half-a-crown and a plate of oysters.  Farington had learned that ‘Girtin drew in outlines and Turner washed in the effects’. For the most part they copied sketches by John Robert Cozens, but several of the products of the ‘Monro Academy’, as it was called, are copies after Edward Dayes, a distinguished topographer in whose studio Girtin worked for a short time. Several Lake District subjects seem to be derived from Dayes, and this is likely to be one of them. Beneath Turner’s warm, sonorous washes – already the sophisticated handling of the youthful master – Girtin’s staccato pencil outlines can be seen, infusing a nervous vitality that sharpens the subject and helps make this small sheet a powerful evocation of the wide Lakeland spaces that Wordsworth was at the same moment beginning to immortalise in his early poetry.

Even while he was working for Monro, in the middle years of the 1790s, Turner was starting to build a repertory of scenes for which he was not reliant on other artists’ impressions, but which he had visited himself. Apart from a brief but highly productive trip to Paris and the Alps in 1802, he confined himself to Great Britain until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when he launched into an intensive programme of foreign travel. Much of the middle years of his life were spent gathering images in Italy, France, Switzerland, Holland and Germany, on tours that were usually motivated by very specific business projects: he was by now constantly in demand as an illustrator of ‘picturesque tours’ and some of his finest work was executed to be engraved and published in conjunction with rapturous prose (and sometimes verse) descriptions of the thrilling scenery of Europe.

One of the most ambitious of these projects was a plan to publish a series of volumes of ‘Turner’s Annual Tours’ taking the reader through the scenery of the major ‘Rivers of Europe’. In the event only three volumes appeared, two on the Seine, and one on the Loire, in 1830, 1832 and 1833. He made several extensive journeys to collect material for the work, including in his sights the Danube, the Rhine and the Mosel. Although most of the drawings he made were never published, they are among the most astonishing in his output. He chose to work on blue sugar paper, torn into small, easily pocketable sheets, and sometimes scribbled a quick note in pencil, but often worked directly onto the blue support in brilliant bodycolour. Here his genius as a colourist is at once apparent. In the view On the Mosel: Bernkastel, Kues and the Landshut he contrasts a vivid ochre with soft blues and purples, capturing the fall of bright light on steeply sculpted mountains, against which the buildings, solidly evoked with exquisite drawing, gleam a brilliant white. Turner’s sense of the impending possibility of translation into the black-and-white medium of line engraving seems to force him to chromatic extremes, in a kind of provocation to the engraver that would wring powerful tonal expression from his burin.

This is the place to introduce another work in bodycolour, the extraordinary head of a young woman that has sparked so much debate. It is probably datable to the period just after the ‘Rivers of Europe’ drawings, that is, the late 1830s or 1840s, and is unlikely to relate to Turner’s travels. Indeed, it has traditionally been associated with the homely locations of Margate and Chelsea, and identified as the portrait of a fisherwoman lying in the sun. An alternative theory, that this is a dead woman found on the foreshore of the Thames, is clearly mistaken: the warm pink flesh tones, the open blue eyes, the lips apart in what is evidently a gasp of pleasure, all suggest a subject very much alive. It is highly likely that this is one of the many drawings that Turner made for his own enjoyment, showing young women in various states of dishabille, sometimes in the company of a man, sometimes alone. Here the close-up range, and the intimacy of the whole subject, make for an especially immediate and erotically charged image.

The sheet can also be seen as a character study, the kind of vignette that a novelist might pen, as a detail for inclusion in a larger work. And indeed, Turner’s fascination with human nature – including his own – is what provides the true subject matter of many of his landscapes: the natural world is the setting for all the activities of men and women, and indeed its splendours and terrors are meaningless without mankind as witness and participant. The long series of studies that he made on his journeys are thus by way of being stage sets for the pageant of life, often replete with their own shadowy cast of characters. During the years when he was making his bodycolour-on-blue-paper drawings for the ‘Rivers of Europe’ he was also noting what he saw on larger sheets of good white wove paper, bound in sketchbooks with paper covers that could be easily rolled and carried in the pocket of his greatcoat. This sequence stretches over the last decade or more of his life and affords an ever-changing panorama of ravishing meditations on nature.

View in the Domleschg Valley, Switzerland is a fine example. Executed with wonderful rapidity on the page of a ‘roll’ sketchbook that has recently been reconstituted from scattered sheets, probably sold through Turner’s agent Thomas Griffith, it is a vision of melting colours, as the mists rise from the river at the foot of towering cliffs under a primrose dawn sky. The church tower and roofs of a distant town and a few isolated figures on the rocks at the right anchor this magical scene in a particular moment of human experience, a moment that we feel Turner might have amplified into a finished watercolour, one of the late masterpieces that are the crowning achievement of his career as the supreme exponent of the medium.

The Domleschg Valley scene was never developed into such a complete statement, but The Brunig Pass from Meiringen is a magnificent example of just this type of work. So ingrained was Turner’s habit of producing his watercolours in long sequences that he devoted much time in the 1840s to recreating a situation he had been familiar with all through his earlier career: working to order for a publisher’s commission for a set of ‘picturesque views’. By now, however, such commissions had dried up, and he took the step of going to Thomas Griffith and showing him studies that might be worked up for any clients who cared to commission finished pictures. These studies, worked up on the pages of his ‘roll’ sketchbooks, were similar in character to the Domleschg drawing just described.  In 1841 Griffith, with the enthusiastic support of the young John Ruskin, commissioned ten such pictures, including The Blue Rigi (sold in these Rooms, 5 June 2006, lot 53), and in 1842 another ten. These were among the greatest works that Turner ever produced, and in 1843 he began a further set.  Ruskin argued that, by the middle of the decade, illness was affecting his work; but it is now clear that there are sets, or parts of sets, dating from even the late years of the 1840s, which reveal that, far from diminishing in power, Turner’s vision was as grand as ever.  He suffered only from the judgement of contemporary taste, which increasingly approved of polished and minute detail and disapproved of his impressionistic, ground-breaking visions, on the basis that ‘nothing like them had been seen before’ (E. Joll, ‘Who bought Turner’s late pictures and how were these received?’ in Exploring Late Turner, ed. L. Parris, exhibition catalogue, Salander O’Reilly, New York, 1999, p. 111).

The Brunig Pass from Meiringen emerges from seclusion in the Wood Prince collection to prove this beyond question. One of the last, it is also one of the most moving of the ‘late Swiss watercolours’, an expansion of many of the landscape themes that had fascinated Turner in the Alps since he had first visited them as a young man. The place is seen as the natural environment of its inhabitants, who set out on their daily occupations amid the glories of a mountain morning, the shadows visibly shifting and lifting across the immense valley in which they live. Although wonderfully full of particular detail, this is also a supreme distillation of the essence of Swiss scenery, vividly presenting its scale and grandeur, and the ineffable mystery of its huge spaces filled with light and shadow. Thanks to its superb state of preservation this watercolour enables us to appreciate, as in few other specimens, the full force of Turner’s late achievement.

Andrew Wilton became curator of the Turner Collection at the new Clore Gallery at the Tate in 1985, then Keeper of British Art there from 1989 to 1997, and Keeper and Senior Research Fellow from 1998. He is the author of many works on Turner, including the catalogue raisonné of Turner’s finished watercolours, ‘The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner’, 1979, ‘Turner in Switzerland’, 1977 and ‘Turner in his Time’, 1987.  He was one of the four expert authors who contributed essays to the prestigious exhibition, ‘Turner: The Great Watercolours’ (Royal Academy, London, 2000).