When visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum to view the works of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, there was clear favoritism that developed as I viewed the works of both artists. Don’t get me wrong– Constable’s more expressive works drew me in, as did the billowing clouds that populate so many of his revolutionary landscapes. It’s a bit difficult to look away once you’ve begun looking, to say the least!
That being said, when it came to Turner’s work, I could spend a thousand lifetimes living and dying in front of them– and that’s putting it lightly. The work which captured my attention most readily was the seascape of East Cowes Castle, a location which one can’t help but feel Turner had frequented.
However, when looking at Turner’s body of work, it quickly becomes clear that the magic and genius of it lies not in his locations, but in the lighting of his pieces. I initially attributed the brightness of Turner’s sun to his potential use of lead white, which many other artists of the era would have been fond of. (It’s said to be beyond replication in its glowing brightness, after all.) However, that alone cannot elevate a piece to inspire fixation as Turner’s does.
Rather it lies in his depiction of the sun, not as a cool, still dot, but as a collection of rays, waves, ellipses, etc. Turner understood, just as others during his time were beginning to understand, that the sun is not observed by the human eye as a particular shape, rather, as beams of light collecting and reflecting. As we can see, this realization served Turner well. While East Cowes Castle is not particularly sublime in nature, we are able to see this concept in Turner’s larger body of work. Sublimity is associated with grand awe or terror in the face of the natural world. This can be seen in Turner’s Snow Storm, which is a bit more expressive and conveys the sheer force of nature over man’s often futile endeavors. In his portrayal of this scene, he achieves the sublime to some degree.
Also tying in nature, there are two suns in the East Cowes Castle, The Regatta starting for their Moorings piece, one in the sky, and one reflected in the gentle waves of what is presumably the River Medina. The light spreads from the point that represents the sun, and reflects onto the landscape, sailboats, and the absolute swarm of people on the banks of the river. The people and boats stand out twofold in their warm beigey, browny tan-ness, and in the darkness that stands in contrast to the cool pale sky and bright sun. It invokes the feeling of a cool wind that blows in from the sea on an otherwise humidly tepid day. As a child of a city on the sea, I must say I like it.
Much of the paint was cracked upon viewing Turner’s pieces in person, which makes one wonder whether they cracked 150 years ago due to the sheer thickness of paint that Turner applied, or if the 150 years since the scene was first rendered have been unkind to Turner’s art. Regardless I pray that his art remains in the many free galleries of London, a city so often overcast, as a source of sunshine on an otherwise dreary day. His work is just as intended, and achieves what so many artists of his day yearned to be.
Art and Glory 