Turner and the sea - Current and Coming - Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, March, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

At this death in 1851 the visionary artist Joseph Mallord William Turner bequeathed three hundred oils, more than twenty thousand drawings and watercolors, and some three hundred sketchbooks to Great Britain's national collections (then housed in the National Gallery in London). They are today in the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain in London. During his lifetime, Turner purposely kept some of his works off the market and repurchased others. Thus his bequest contains important examples spanning his entire and very productive career.

The Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland is the only American museum to show an exhibition entitled Reflections of Sea and Light: Paintings and Watercolors by J. MW Turner from Tate, which will be on view until May 26. It comprises more than one hundred watercolors, paintings, drawings, and prints selected by Ian Warrell, one of the curators at the Tate, to represent an overview of some forty years of the artist's output. More than two dozen of these pictures have never before been exhibited.

Turner demonstrated keen artistic talent as a child, exhibiting a watercolor at the Royal Academy when he was just fifteen. Water in all of its forms--rivers, lakes, seas, and rain--preoccupied him throughout his career, and his early, more academic works include scenes of ships along the shores of the Thames River. From 1807 to 1819, he worked sporadically on a landscape project (published at irregular intervals in fourteen parts) entitled Liber Studionum. For this work, he executed the majority of the etchings from which the published mezzotints were made. Many of these works were, in turn, based on his topographical watercolors done in England and abroad. Other publication projects also necessitated traveling; in England's West Country and the north, Turner painted water in all weather conditions, sunrises, and buildings in stormy weather. In the 1820s and l830s Turner made visits to the Continent where once again he was captivated by the beautiftil scenery along the rivers.

The early 1830s mark the beginning of Turner's late period, during which he explored more deeply the effects of light in diverse weather conditions, leading him to paint the sublime and atmospheric views of weather-tossed seas and misty scenes punctuated by strong sunlight for which he is so famous. These extraordinary depictions of water under varying light conditions resulted in nearly abstract compositions that did much to solidify his legacy as one of the most avant-garde artists of the nineteenth century and as such a precursor of the French impressionist movement.

There is no catalogue of this exhibition.