TURNER.

The Master Painters

by Eric; Turner Shanes

J M W Turner was a prolific master born to a barber in Covent Garden in 1775. When he died in 1851, he left over 19,000 artworks. Selecting which to include in this book was a major feat in itself. Turner was a Romantic when it came to landscapes, with an inimitable flair for seascapes, and was a pioneer of new techniques to create tone and hue, deeply impressed by Goethe's theory of colours. It took a great art critic named John Ruskin to interpret his works in full. Turner was also a successful art gallery owner, professor of the Royal Academy and tireless traveller who invariably returned home to England laden with outstanding artworks from abroad, especially Venice. With a keen eye for dramatic angle, he also documented on canvas the Battle of Waterloo, the fire that devoured Parliament and other major historical events of his time. Today his works figure in the collections of the most famous museums in London, Los Angeles, New York and Washington DC.

Genres: Art, Cultural, Nonfiction

144 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Kalliope · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turner stretched the paper onboard and after plunging them into water, he dropped the colours onto the paper while it was wet, making marblings and gradations throughout the work.

His completing process was marvelously rapid, for he indicated his masses and incidents, took out half-lights, scraped out highlights and dragged, hatched and stippled until the design was finished.

This short introduction to the paintings by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1881) is excellent given its superb selection of sixty of his works, in full colour.





The accompanying text is also a rewarding read as a presentation of the painter. It follows mostly a chronological and factual line, but does pay closer attention to the topographical grounding of his landscapes; to his trips to Switzerland, France and Italy which broadened his vision and the spectrum of his light; to his experimental approach to technical boundaries, as the quote from a contemporary above shows; and to his focus on light in light of the findings in optics during his time, which led him to concentrate further on the primary colours as the basis for his compositions.

Shanes also displays how far Turner's work traveled through his prolific life, departing from his first exhibited St Anselm's Chapel, with part of Thomas-à-Becket's crown, Canterbury Cathedral, from 1794




until his last works from the late 1840s, with his Sunrise with Sea Monsters





and his The Visit to the Tomb, one of the four in his last exhibition of 1850.





I have missed some discussion of his relationship with the young John Ruskin (1819-1900), since his views of Venice would colour the vision of the young critic and would, eventually, find reflections in the writer who sought to recapture foregone time.

[Adia · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a brief introductory book to the life and works of J.M.W. Turner. includes 60 of his paintings, many of them his well known seascapes. the writing is pretty simple, but informative. i also learned that this was the Turner that painted The Great Fall of the Reichenbach, which as a Holmes enthusiast i feel i should have known.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first book on Turner and it had me catching my breath and in awe at every turn of the page. A great selection of his work, with a rather bare-bones text that gives an outline of both his artistic career and methods, without bogging things down. I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to dip their toe into Turner.

[Marcos Malumbres · Rating 4 out of 5]

The selection of the paintings is excellent and the brief narrative on some details of Turner’s live is also quite interesting. There are however a couple of details that I missed. The biography is very descriptive and there is little reference to the person, and the relationship between the painter and his paintings. Second, and this one got me crazy, whereas the description of biographical data follows (relatively) a chronological order, the presentation of the paintings is almost random, and it is absolutely disconnected from the text. Sometimes a painting is referred in the text but the painting itself is shown 50 pages earlier in the book without any specific rationale. To me this is a major problem with the book. It is like reading a book with advertisement every each other page, nice advertisements, but disconnected from the text.