Exploring Late Turner

by Graham Reynolds, Lawrence B. Salander, Kenneth Clark

"Exploring Late Turner" documents an extraordinary selection of works by J.M.W. Turner, focusing on his creative process during his later years. Of vital importance are over sixteen oil sketches on millboard painted between 1835 and 1840. These sketches are first ideas for compositions, perhaps sketched on the spot, which Turner would have worked up into larger and more developed pictures. By juxtaposing these sketches with works of varying sizes and degrees of finish, "Exploring Late Turner" clarifies their role in the route from idea to finished work of art. Also presented here are Turner's large-scale canvases, including the exemplary "Europa and the Bull", as well as a splendid group of watercolors if varying degrees of finish that help to further define the unique development of Turner's composition towards the end of his life.

180 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2001

About the author

Arthur Graham Reynolds CVO OBE FBA (10 January 1914 – 13 October 2013) was an English art historian who was Keeper of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He was a leading expert on portrait miniatures and the art of John Constable, for whose works he wrote the catalogue raisonné.