JMW Turner: master of the ocean
With an economy that few artists have been able to match, Turner evoked a coastal landscape – the kind of marine view that he had created countless times before, in all manner of ways. Blue Sea and Distant Ship probably dates from the early 1840s, though there is not much to distinguish it from similar works of 10 or even 20 years earlier. It belongs to a group of several hundred rapidly made and highly expressive watercolours, sometimes referred to collectively as colour "beginnings", that form part of the body of preparatory studies, unfinished work and related items from Turner's studio that went to the national art collection after his death in 1851.
If such works are experiments, they are so only in the loosest sense of the word, as exercises in imagination. After a lifetime of experiencing and imagining the sea, there was little practical value to be learned from such experiments, which seem to convey their maker's undiminished delight in the materials and techniques of his profession, and in the process of transforming unadulterated colour into a boundless seascape.
The more elemental of Turner's late watercolour sketches are often discussed in relation to the non-figurative painting that emerged and flourished during the 20th century. Yet, for all their abstract appeal to modern eyes, Blue Sea and Distant Ship, and other watercolours and oil paintings made in the same spirit, are determinedly figurative. A more rounded view of the work that Turner produced away from the public eye reveals a far greater variety of imagery reaching across his whole career. Some of it is experimental, some even verges on the incomprehensible, but much of it is more conventional in subject and technique, and more clearly grounded in the principles of land- and seascape painting that had been established during the previous century.
Turner rarely travelled without a pencil and pocket-sized sketchbook to hand. Among his belongings during his second visit to Scotland, in 1801, was a small sketchbook treated with a tinted wash that could be scratched away to reveal the white paper beneath. Thus armed with a single brush and colour, he was able repeatedly to model the infinitely complex surge of North Sea waves breaking on Dunbar beach. One such wave reappeared a year or so later on the walls of the Royal Academy, much embellished and combined with the contents of another sketchbook but in essence unchanged, as the central motif of Fishermen upon a Lee-Shore, in Squally Weather.
Increasingly, he made his watercolour sketches and compositional studies in the studio or, when travelling, in his lodgings after a long day exploring and observing. They are filtered by memory, simplified and reconfigured by the physical properties of the artist's chosen medium. At first glance, a watercolour thought to represent the Eddystone Lighthouse gives the impression of having been made rapidly in front of the subject. It appears in a sketchbook interleaved with numerous pencil drawings of West Country scenes and other landscapes from the early 1810s, when Turner made several visits to the Devon coast. But the lighthouse is situated 12 miles off Plymouth, and the image, a night scene, is one of three that show the structure at different times of day and in various stages of a storm. The effect of immediacy was fabricated safely on dry land, heightened by the storm of watercolour that the artist conjured around the remembered outline of the isolated tower.
Turner was known for being secretive about his methods and means. . read more:
