Unlimited beauty
Andrew Lambirth
Paths to Fame: Turner Watercolours from the Courtauld
Courtauld Institute, Somerset House, WC2, until 25 January 2009 Sponsored by the Bank of New York Mellon This is the first full display of the Courtauld’s holding of Turner watercolours, recently enriched by nine paintings from the Scharf Bequest. The exhibition is further enhanced by loans from the Tate, and offers a splendid introduction to one of the greatest English artists. Despite a lifetime of almost ceaseless travel, J.M.W. Turner was very much a Londoner. Born a barber’s son in Covent Garden in 1775 he showed early promise and the unflagging industry to put his talent to best use. He was ambitious as well as hard-working, travelling England to record notable architecture and natural scenery. He had a particular talent for depicting the effects of light and nature’s drama. Success early attended him: at 24 he became the youngest Royal Academician on record and continued to work ceaselessly. He set up his own gallery to exhibit and sell his paintings and when he died in 1851 he was a very wealthy man. He left behind him a huge body of work of unlimited beauty.
There is at least one fascinating first-hand account of the artist in action. Turner’s friend and patron, Walter Fawkes, asked him to draw a man-of-war. Apparently he began by pouring wet paint on to the paper until it was saturated, then ‘he tore, he scratched, he scrubbed at it in a kind of frenzy and the whole thing was chaos — but gradually and as if by magic the lovely ship, with all its exquisite minutiae, came into being’. Not many artists can summon forth beauty in this way from a misty, shadowy ferment, and bring definition to the amorphous. In this exhibition you can see at least some of that process, with Turner laying in the abstract colour bases of his compositions in what were in fact studies for more finished views.
For instance, look at the centrepiece of the exhibition, placed on the central panel in the gallery, the famous ‘Crook of Lune, looking towards Hornby Castle’ in North Lancashire. This magnificent watercolour, dating from c.1816–18, is a marvellous example of Turner’s technical virtuosity, with various methods of applying and removing the paint (stopping out and scratching away), and the sharpest possible eye for the telling detail that reveals the true nature of a landscape. Next to it hangs a colour beginning for the picture (from the Tate), an abstract study of colour shapes that is actually substantially larger than the finished picture. To complete the ensemble is a sketchbook in the cabinet below, containing Turner’s pencil notations of the subject, though rather faint and difficult to decipher in this context.
The show starts chronologically with an early study of the Avon Gorge featuring Old Hot Wells House (quite a famous spa in its time, until a number of people died of drinking the waters). Turner would have been 17 when he painted it, and already there’s an unusual inventiveness to the composition besides its vigorous and dramatic delineation. Then there’s a lovely pencil drawing of Tom Tower at Christ Church, Oxford, spare and rhythmic and topographically correct, unlike the slightly adjusted watercolour next to it which takes liberties with the visual truth for the sake of the drama of the design. The drawing of Tewkesbury Abbey is altogether more picturesque and feathery, the crisp lines of the architecture overgrown somewhat. Nearby are a couple of views of Bonneville in Savoy, including another colour beginning which (like the Crook of Lune one) has an abstract beauty all its own.
This is a small show of only 30 works, but it includes many to exclaim over. Among the most notable is the dark maelstrom of the Upper Falls of the Reichenbach, a wonderful work (look at the way Turner has scored and rubbed the paper to let the white through) of a setting made sinister for all readers of detective fiction as the place where Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty struggled to the death. Much sweeter is ‘View of Bregenz’ (1840), in coloured chalks and gouache, less structurally emphatic yet nonetheless very charming. Another river painting, ‘Falls of the Rhine at Schauffhausen’ (?1841), shows how Turner managed to convey much with minimal means. A different mood is caught by the watercolour of Colchester, featuring the castle in its huddle of trees above a scene of hare coursing beside the river Colne. A reviewer in The Spectator of June 1831 wrote, ‘a picture whose wild reality and truth are like Rembrandt’s landscapes’. Other beauties include a couple of storm studies at Margate and the famous howling dog in ‘Dawn after the Wreck’, copied by Ruskin.
The excellent display around the walls of the third-floor gallery is matched by a further group of works in the centre of the room on table easels, including an exquisite view of ‘Abingdon from the Thames Navigation’. In this painting Turner, never one to copy the facts slavishly if alteration improved his picture, has re-invented the lock. What does it matter? It’s a ravishing piece of painting.
In addition to the Turner display there’s a selection of glories from the Scharf bequest of British watercolours, to be found through a gallery of moderns at the rear of the Turners. In 2007, the collector Dorothy Scharf left 51 watercolours and drawings to the Courtauld, mostly dating from 1750–1850, the much-loved Golden Age of watercolour painting. Just a handful of these are now on view, but what a handful — even without the Turners they make a visit to the Courtauld worthwhile. The first is a lovely John White Abbott ‘On the Dart, From Holme Chase’ (c.1800), all inked lines and flat colours, a crisp and atmospheric design. This method of composition Abbott learnt from Francis Towne, whose most gifted pupil he was. Elsewhere in the room hangs Towne’s own ‘Llyn Cwellyn’ (1777), a magisterial panorama of mountains, valley and light, conjuring the most extraordinary sense of space from pale washes of colour.
There’s a romantic black chalk drawing by Gainsborough, an imaginary landscape composition done while the poor man was confined to town painting portraits (often rather successfully, it must be said) for a living. Here you see what he dreamed of: a wooded Suffolk landscape with a cottage and cows. Among the other treasures are a superb Richard Wilson of the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, a good Edward Lear landscape of Greece and a Samuel Palmer of Sevenoaks. Constable is represented by a watercolour of Stanway Mill near Colchester, with rain lashing across from the left. One of the most enjoyable pictures is Richard Parkes Bonington’s ‘Fishing Boats Moored in an Estuary’, a typical subject expertly and evocatively handled. The Girtin of Tintern Abbey in blue-greys and browns, though fabulous in its way, looks almost dull in such company.
The Turner exhibition is accompanied by a handsomely produced catalogue (£20 in softback) of a size easy to handle, written and compiled by Joanna Selborne with additional essays by Andrew Wilton and Cecilia Powell. The exhibition was previously at Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum & Art Gallery in Grasmere. If you haven’t yet seen it, a visit is strongly recommended. The other Courtauld collections downstairs (Manet, Gauguin, Renoir et alia) make Somerset House a place of pilgrimage for any art lover. ❑
Previous page
