Turner 1 of 2

Turner, born in 1775, painted more than 400 paintings during his lifetime (and I can tell they are big too!).  He was a self-contained and private man, fanatical about his paintings. At his place, he had a lot of paintings and unfinished pieces which he didn’t want to show anyone, but after his death, they ended up in the hands of the nation and the Clore Foundation. Turner would be horrified to know that nowadays they are on public display and so much people are watching them on a daily basis!

You can tell a lot by looking at self-portraits. In this photo, you can see that Turner wanted to portray himself as a gentleman. His father worked as a barber and wigmaker and you can tell that Turner cared about his hair. Also, Turner was an associate member of the Royal Academy, something that was very important to him. At the time of the portrait, Turner was about 24 years old.

Turner was self-taught and he was very interested in history and he loved landscapes. At that time, art could be divided according to its importance. Most important was history painting while landscape painting was the least important. Turner is very known for his landscapes but he did both and in his history paintings he often made references between the present and the past, the old and the new.

 In this painting of Rusia for example, you can see a subtle historical reference to Hannibal conquering Rome on his elephant in the background. Further, at this time, there was no TV but Turner had this capability to create drama and draw people into his paintings. Just look at how he captures the weather! 

Do you see the elephant in the horizon?

Turner travelled every summer and made 57 journeys in Europe; to Germany and Italy amongst other places. In wintertime he came back to his studio to paint.  Turner had this incredible visual memory for color, which came into great use since he couldn’t paint outside due to the absence of color tubes. Instead, his father helped him to grind the colors back in the studio.
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I have much more curiosa about Turner, but I decided to divide the post in two. It really is worth going to guided tours, having someone telling you the stories behind the artists and their paintings. It makes it so much more interesting!