Turner's watercolours


Turner's works showed the use of watercolour paints facilitated the emergence of landscape painting and influenced new developments in the genre. Turner's use of watercolour in his travel sketches facilitated the emergence of his landscape studies, these early works of topographical watercolour allowed him to develop his innovative handling of the medium. When he applied these watercolour techniques to his oils, they showed influences of the use of freedom of techniques, the observation of light effects and the portrayal of sublimity, which fostered new developments in the landscape genre.

This period witness an enthusiasm for touring and sightseeing among the middle classes as well as the aristocracy. Many of Turner's first watercolours were executed to exploit the market for topographical and antiquarian views. These were mostly worked up from rougher, calligraphic drawings executed on the spot. The two studies of Dunstanborough Castle from the South (1797) revealed his early handling of the medium. In both sketches a few quick pencil marks have provided the starting point. The sketch in black and grey washes conveyed a stronger awareness of atmospheric effect. Both works possessed a sense of immediacy. Colour is added to the other study as informational note marks. A finished watercolour worked up from the sketches a year or two later, Dunstanborough Castle (c. 1798-1800) retained a sense of freshness and vitality but there is a loss of instantaneous quality; body colour has been added to the watercolour to give a sense of greater density and Turner has scratched back into it, a procedure that was to become a hallmark of his later production in both watercolour and oils.

The chronological order of Turner's works provided insight to his technical development, thus it is useful to trace his travel routes. They provide evidence of how Turner evolves his unique skills with watercolour and turned it into a major means of expression for his landscapes. Turner's early travels to Scotland, Switzerland and the Thames showed his experimental exploration with watercolour medium. This is a preferable medium for its lightness and easily transportable properties for travelers. The 1819 visit to Venice, Italy proved to be the turning point for Turner and the late Swiss watercolours being the climax of his travel works.

A long sequence of studies resulting from a second visit to North Wales in 1799 is more concerned with details of geology and light effects. As in the view of Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle, Turner worked with large sheets of paper and in colour on the spot. He later developed his initial sketches into studies of immense power and complexity, such as the view looking down on Llanberis in a burst of sunlight. The traveled place as well as time had a virtually important role to play in Turner's approach to his landscape art. Turner continued to use watercolour in a more natural manner in on-the-spot studies like Edinburgh from St. Margaret's Lock, a page in one of the sketchbooks used on his visit to Scotland in 1801.

His first Swiss landscapes focused on the grandeur and bleakness of the mountains, staples of the Sublime, and are monochromatic in tonal tendency. He often sketched on paper prepared with grey wash, using these drawings mainly as reference material for his other work . He depicted glaciers and treacherously steep mountain paths linked by improbably suspended arched bridges, towering mountains and waterfalls whose spray mingled with the mountain mists creating a sense of dizzy heights and steep descents, for example the large St Hugos denouncing vengeance on the Shepard of Cormayer, in the valley d' Aoust (1803).

Turner's earlier sketching tours of Scotland and Wales had served as a preparation for the spectacular grandeur of Swiss scenery, scenes that he was familiar from studying the watercolours of John Robert Cozens. Cozen's grand and threatening, yet delicately drawn portrayals of alpine scenery transcend topographical exactitude, conveying visually those feelings of overwhelming scale, awe and fear. They are the most significant precursors of Turner's first Swiss landscape of the early 1800s. The experience of Turner's alpine tour of 1802 was synthesized graphically in a number of the early plates of mountain scenery he produced for the Liber Studiorum, for example, the design for Lake of Thun, Swiss (1808) categorized as 'Mountainous'.

It reached its culmination a decade later in the painting, Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps (1856), in which the classical subject is portrayed in Sublime mode, invested with the power and actuality of Turner's experience and his close observation of alpine territory and atmosphere. Here Turner had moved away from recording topography and was preoccupied with achieving specific effects of light and tone. He used these studies to work up some of the most spectacular subjects for large exhibition watercolours. Despite their scale and degree of finish these achieve a remarkable feeling of immediacy; in Glacier and source of the Arveron, going up to the Mer de Glace (1803) there is a sense of movement in the weather and the trees as there would be on a stormy day in the mountains. This is rendered by the skilful use of the pen or point of the brush, while the highlights-the snow, the clouds and the goats-are achieved by leaving the white paper bare and by scratching out. These same methods were used to equal effect in The Great Falls of the Reichenbach (1804).

Although he continued to travel aboard regularly, Turner did not return to Switzerland until 1836. He made over 400 drawings in six sketchbooks , but this tour did not result in any finished watercolours. The drawings are often already coloured so as to define the spacious atmospheric effects of mountains. Now that he had seen Switzerland he could let himself go in mountain view that embodies all the aspects considered necessary for the making of the Sublime.

After his move to Sion Ferry House at Isleworth in 1804-5, Turner made many sketching trips along the Thames and its branch the Wey, noting details of the landscape and more general compositional effects. He used five new sketchbooks , for recording his view in Isleworth and Kew. In his Hesperides sketchbook, he began by recording some of the weather effects in colour. A rainbow bright against a leaden sky frames the first sketch; the second sketch depicted clouds loom over the river. A boat makes its way to the left, scratched and wiped out of the paint to reveal the white paper beneath. The next in the series shows another rainbow, even more spectacular than the first, doubled and reflected in the river. Turner communicated his excitement through the paint marks lively dashing in, hurried scratching and wiping, saturated colour, loaded brush, wet paint. The results are some of the freshest, most naturalistic in his watercolour so far.

From the small panels Turner's oil sketching grew in both size and ambition. The oil sketches on canvas, being painted quite thinly in bright, often transparent colour on a white ground, bear close comparison with the watercolours in the sketchbook. Sailing up-river from Isleworth, the first site at which Turner stopped to work was Kingston, where he made an oil sketch of figures on the river bank (1865). He later developed the composition into a finished picture, Harvest Dinner, Kingston Bank (1809). The sketch was dashed out on a half-sized canvas in no more than a few minutes' work. The next subject upstream is Hampton Court from the Thames (1805), the time of day is evening. He spent the evening dedicating considerable attention to the forms and colours of the reflections. He was always willing to look at nature afresh and study attentively.

Turner's approach to scenery was to make rapid pencil notations, often in the process of traveling and then flesh some of them out in colour later, which demand his prodigious visual memory. The rapidly changing skies which most of all demanded such an approach, where the emphasis is not on cloud shapes, but on the change of lighting which the movement represents. For water also, Turner observed its subtle shifts of form and colour, familiarized himself with every movement of its light over the surface. The watercolours of Venice are delicate and objective, as in Looking east from the Giudecca, sunrise (1819).

Turner has used watercolour in front of a subject. During the day, on his sketching tours, he drew in pencil. Drawing provided the framework on which the colours that he carried in his head could be hung later. The watercolours were made in his lodgings at night. In the Monte Gennaro (1819) Turner was recording not so much an impression of a scene as a potentiality of paint. In late October Vesuvius began erupting and Turner hurried to watch it, resulted in Vesuvius in Eruption (1819). The actual experience of the trip is strong and inspiring. He had been moving away from the old systems of organizing a picture by tonal contrasts, towards a vision of nature based on colour contrasts and harmonies, colour as mass and structure.

Turner's watercolour practice led him to the use of a white ground. Turner paints on a white ground with a new and lighter brush style to retain the freshness and simplicity of early washes, because their transparency often played a decisive role in the final drawing. It is not surprising that he soon sought to adapt the same discoveries and methods to his more ambitious work in oils. By the use of driving very fine films of white, or of colour mixed with white, over a properly prepared ground, he successfully imitated the effects of air and mist. Together, with the importance of white, as a dense and highly reflective pigment, went the increasing use of a brilliant white ground, which brought Turner's oil technique at this period even close to his practice in watercolour: 'Paper a the acting ground in watercolours/ white in oil colours'-He wrote in a note about 1840 .

By mid 1820s, the division of the spectrum into warm and cool colours had become an important principle for Turner and towards the end of that decade he began to experiment with the division of his pictorial space into clearly defined areas, particularly in watercolour, where the developing use of a broadly washed under paint, or 'colour beginning' allowed him a very abstracted view of colour balance, for example Pembroke Castle, Wale (c.1819). The fruits of this can be seen in Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829), Turner seems to have thought of expressing his subject in terms of colour. He began to paint habitually on a light canvas, so that the hues would shine more brightly.

After the experiment of the 1820s, Turner's Academy pieces of the 1830s exhibited a freedom of execution with boldly distorted perspective and a brilliance of colouring which continued to shock his public; such as the two versions of The Burning of the Houses of Parliament (1835), that model of the mingling of fire and water. On hearing of the fire he rushed out to record the scene from both sides of the river. He made nine rapid watercolour sketches on the spot that night. The two sketches Colour Study: The Burning of the House of Parliament (1834), in which fire merges with both sky and water, are images of the most vivid brilliance-they are pages from Turner's sketchbook - studies for the two oils. The two oils both deploy his favourite contrast of warm and cool areas of colour.

In The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to her Last Berth (1838), Turner emphasized the contrast between the ghostly old warship and the squat, dirty little steam tug that is towing it to its extinction. He counterpoises the harsh reds and oranges on the right - the side of the tug and the setting sun - with beautiful pale and ghostly harmonies on the left - the side of the old ship and a sickle moon. Similarly, in The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhoon coming on) (1840), Turner's intensely dramatic technique matches the horror of the real incident when dying slaves were thrown overboard. Nowhere did he use his new sense of colour with more power than when he painted the ship's rigging blood red to suggest guilt and the sky with purple and violent orange to intimate Divine retribution. By the end of the decade this had become such a prominent feature of his colour organization that theorists began to identify it specifically with him.

The case that appears to lift landscape beyond the historical to a point where it presaged the developments of modern art - that of work produced by Turner in is last years. The spontaneous technique of painting was expanded and refined in the following decades, and by the 1840s Turner had developed an astonishing virtuosity. Turner's method was to float in his broken colours while the paper was wet. William Leighton reported: "…he stretched the paper on boards, and, after plunging them in water, he dropped the colours onto the paper while it was wet, making marbling and gradations throughout the work. His completing process was marvelously rapid, for he indicated masses and incidents, took out half-lights, scraped out high lights, and dragged, hatched and stippled until the design was finished" .

This working practice enabled Turner to preserve the purity and luminosity of his work, and to paint at a prodigiously rapid rate. The interchangeability of techniques and materials between the two mediums was unusually spontaneous. From his first recorded oil of c.1793, to the white-primed canvases and delicate surface drawing of the final decades, Turner exemplified similar interests in all his highly inventive procedures. In his 1840 visit to Venice, he provided a long series of paintings and watercolour studies, including numerous views of the buildings of the city seen across the waters of the Lagoon, exploring different effects of light, as in a sketch of Venice Moonrise.

The practice of constant observation, the exercise of his extraordinary memory and his alarming artistic talent are abundantly evident in the four series of Swiss watercolour that he completed between 1841 and 1850, numbering over twenty highly finished works and numerous studies. Amongst these, the groups of drawings of Mount Rigi, which Turner watched and drew repeatedly from the window of his hotel, the Hotel du Cygne, are of special interest and merit. The Blue Rigi (1841-42) depicting the mountain in the cool colours of morning, and The Red Rigi showing it in the warm glow of sunset. A third, The Dark Rigi portrays the subject looming as a dark shadowy shape just before the first light of dawn. Such repeated portrayals of a subject from the same viewpoint, in different light and at different times of day has often been seen as prophetic of later nineteenth century practice, exemplified by Monet's haystacks. All depictions of the Rigi represent fleeting appearances that are as much remembered as observed.

The view of Goldau (1843) prevails the mood of the late Swiss watercolours is one of contemplative calm in the face of an immense and serene nature, the dramatic portrayal of Goldau in colours of searing intensity shows nature's other, more frightening aspect. The study for Goldau establishes the main outlines of the design, with the addition of cool yellow and blue washes, and with a bleached view into the empty distance. The molten reds and yellows that define the emotional pitch of the finished work are amongst the most dramatic in Turner's oeuvre. The board, flat and jagged application of paint in the sky, so different from the fluid use of colour elsewhere, approximates to Turner's use of the palette knife in oil painting of the period.

Some Turner's subjects are taken from contemporary life, and are chosen to give fullest rein to the artist's capacity to render atmosphere in all its subtlety, as in Snow storm - steam-boat off a harbour's mouth making signal in shallow water, and going by the lead, with a strongly centralized light. He drew with his brush in transparent glaze and build up form with multiple stokes. Turner took a keen interest in the awe-inspiring nature of the railway. Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) both celebrates the Great Western Railway and shows it destructive impact. He devised a completely new type of pictorial composition to express the power of the train as it rushed diagonally out of the canvas, leaving a tranquil rural world stranded in the background. He also developed new ways of putting on paint to produce the effect of features dimly seen through steam and driving rain.

Turner's watercolour stimulated the emergence of landscape by transferring the raw material - the land into an art form and it was the application of the methods as well as the subject repertory of watercolour to oil painting which led to some of the most original elements in Turner's style. As expressed by J. Lindsay: "Turner had an important effect on the development of modern art - not only by stimulating some particular kind of technique of handling paint, but also by exerting a general liberating and stimulating influence through his fresh and varied ways of defining light and colour" .



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Bibliography:

Gage, John. J.M.W. Turner: a wonderful range of mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Herrmann, Luke. Turner. Oxford: Phaidon, 1986.

Hill, David. Turner on the Thames: river journeys in the year 1805. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Lindsay, Jack. Turner: the man and his art. London: Granada, 1985.

Lloyd, Michael. Turner. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1996.

Wilton, Andrew. Turner in his time. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987.



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