My hugely talented friend Aileen Blaney allowed me to post this here. Read a review of Turner's watercolours that were recently on show at the National Gallery, Dublin,.
In
the year 1900, the Vaughen Bequest of Turner watercolors was bequeathed to the
National Gallery of Ireland. Henry Vaughen, son of a prosperous hat maker who
left him a sizable fortune, was a curator in the oldest sense of the word
embodying as he did a caretaker of artworks under his watch. Vaughen took care
of his prized Turner collection in death as he did in life. In his bequest he
stipulated that the watercolors be shown only during the sun starved month of
January, safeguarding them from the corrosive effects of sunlight. And so it
came to pass in the 100 and more Januarys since, in a room in the National
Gallery in Dublin, the Vaughen Bequest has been brightening up winter’s darkest
month.
Ironically,
Turner’s predilection for extreme weather conditions is being mirrored in
scenes unfolding over the last few weeks along North Atlantic seaboards. Red
alert weather warnings for Ireland have been accurately forecasting 150km/h
winds, unprecedented rainfall and tidal surges that are sundering promenades,
spewing up the sea’s organic and calcified innards onto coastal roads, and
submerging low-lying car parks. And yet on the coat tails of Christmas and New
Year’s Atlantic storms are the coral hues of munificent sunsets and skies
splashed with generous vaults of blue. Only the 19th Century great masters
committed to a life soldered to a sketchpad and paintbrush could hope to
approximate the elements’ aesthetic imprint on the earth’s land and water
bodies. Walking through a chronological arrangement of Turner’s landscapes and
seafaring scenes, I could not but see a progression from art imitating life to
that of art’s ability to transform the subject, noticeably achieved in Turner’s
more impressionistically styled mid-to-late career works. So successful he was
in this entreprise that it is not unusual to hear it said that a sunset is
reminiscent of a Turner and not vice versa.
Depictions
of transient weather conditions are what earned for Turner the attention of art
collectors in his own lifetime. In his hands watercolors become the
accelerating wind gusts that send an afternoon squall whirling through Val
d’Aosta, a valley in the Swiss Alps and reference point for two of the works on
display. Colour and tonality paint the alpine weather more so than the
landscape into existence - inclement conditions are represented in contrasting
ochre, umber and grey washes of colour. The timelessness of these watercolors
is in their beauty and enhanced by the context of viewing them at a moment in history
of heightened anxieties surrounding a perceived increase in hurricane activity.
A scene set in the estuary at Plymouth depicts a navy blue and black sky
bearing down on a ship precariously unsteadied by steep crested white waves,
spelling doom for the crew. Among other achievements these watercolors are
commanding reminders of the vulnerability of human life in situations that can
be neither exploited nor controlled for man’s own ends.
Many
of the works in this January’s Turner exhibition were sketched on European
tours undertaken by the painter in the company of wealthy art collectors and
landowners. A respite in the Napoleonic wars in 1802 provided the first
opportunity to embark on one of these expeditions. Venice, the Lake of Lucerne,
Reichenbach Falls, the Swiss, German and Austrian Alps and the Rhineland were
all scenic stops visited by Turner and his entourages, each location in turn
giving him cause to fill a sketchpad with the outlines of later masterpieces.
Turner would generate a prodigious volume of drawings on these European tours,
the impulse to draw everything that drew his eye having a contemporary
counterpoint in the volume of images taken on digital cameras and phones by
holiday makers to photogenic locations around the world.
Unsurprisingly,
during a Venetian tour in 1840, Turner was pulled into the city’s thrall. In The Doge's Palace and Piazzetta,
bragozzi and other Venetian watercraft sit aloft an aqua marine lagoon
mirroring the waterfront’s elegant buildings. A pen dipped in red watercolor
gives the reflection of Doges Palace the rosy red of its concrete double. By
the end of the 19th century, the inauguration of the Venice Biennale meant that
the city would no longer be the giddy discovery of artists and adventurers,
rapidly becoming one of the main satellites of the art market. In 2013, 475,000
visitors attended the biennale, among them many collectors. However, their
investments are firmly in the artworks. Each January, the National Gallery
reminds us of a bygone era when collectors invested themselves in the
preoccupations of the artists, following them through high mountain passes,
rising at dawn to see the sun rise over Venice and watching mists descend on
valley lakes.
--- Aileen Blaney
--- Aileen Blaney
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