Sponsored : by Kent & Bridget ROBINSON, Winnipeg, Canada
J.M.W. Turner in Italy
The flowering of a genius
Curator: Douglass Montrose-Graem
Remember Turner was an accomplished amateur flute player, with deep roots in music. Traditionally when
The Turner Museum presents art to the public by appealing to all our five senses simultaneously – theme-
appropriate chamber music concerts and 7/24 appropriate background music are included.
This exhibition has a twin purpose: To show Turner’s love for Italy through his beautiful Italian masterworks and to
follow Turner’s meteoric progress as an artist by examining those works more closely. All have long exhibition histories
: first shown in the Graham Gallery New York, 1967- 1969; permanent exhibits in The Turner Museum, Denver, from
1975 to 1997. Among The Turner Museum’s vast collection of Italian subjects, this careful selection is shown in three
groups:
The beginning, a teenager watercolor The first full flowering – 26 gemlike vignettes, the ‘loveliest’ ever produced
and Turner’s top show-stopper, St. Mark’s Place, Venice - Juliet and her Nurse and associated exhibits.
The beginning…
of Turner’s innings -- a teen-age watercolor, View of Tivoli, painted in partnership with his best friend Thomas Girtin, in
the home of a canny art collector who was in the habit of giving budding young artists a square meal and a penny or
two, in exchange for the boys making copies of works in his own collection for a few hours, a classic win-win
arrangement. It is believed one artist did the outlines, the other washed in the details.
This Turner for The Turner Museum is being acquired by the eminent Evelyn Joll of Agnew’s, for many years our advisory
trustee and co-author of the catalog on Turner’s oils. When Tivoli fails to sell at a local auction, Joll snaps it up at a post-
sale bargain price. His opinion: perhaps based on a drawing by the Russian-born Alexander Cozens, or his son John
Robert. Joll remembers seeing it in some sketchbook in Cambridge or Oxford. He promises more research to establish the
identity of the original, but alas death intervenes…
[Perchance, one of our viewers could do the honors…?]
Paired with it, shown here as a curiosity, is a beautiful ‘posthumus’ work (that is one that appeared after Turner’s death in
1851 and therefore not considered an original Turner by this museum), published in 1884, Tivoli – The Temple of Sibyl.
It is a chromolithograph, produced with a process so labor intensive and time-consuming, few contemporary artists have the
appetite to learn the process. (Draw on specially prepared stones, one for each shade of color… some Thomas Moran
chromolithographs, for example, required as many as thirty or more stones…) This lovely view, in turn, is based on a vignette in
Roger’s Italy which neatly segues into this exhibition’s second part: Turner’s first full flowering…
The 26 Gemlike Inimitable Italian Vignettes –
‘the loveliest ever produced by the pure line’
Turner’s celebrated Italian vignettes, were commissioned by a man about town, an amateur poet, with the deep pockets of a
banker. Fortunately for us Samuel Rogers was rich enough to afford the sky high prices Turner demanded for the illustrations of
his Poems – the result was a deluxe folio containing what John Ruskin, the cultural panjandrum of his age, called the
loveliest engravings ever produced by the pure line !
What are vignettes? An image without borders, most closely approximating what our eyes see – not an image with clearly
defined square, round or rectangular borders. Hamerton, an early biographer, after declaring that Turner has seldom been
so perfectly the poet as in the illustrations to Rogers, wrote with such beautiful perception:
If you examine a vignette by Turner round its edges, (if you can call them edges), you will perceive how exquisitely
the objects came out nothingness into being and how cautiously …he will avoid anything like too much materialism
in his treatment of them until he gets well toward the center.
The medium used in the creation of these vignettes is engraving on steel – hard to produce because steel is a hard metal.
After a preliminary etching: the drawing on the metal-plate , has been made, the ‘biting in’ process with acid follows. Only
extraordinary skill can avoid the acid’s penetration beyond the whisper-fine lines the etching needle has drawn on the steel
plate – a slight error in timing can easily result in a spoilt plat e-- and back to square one.
The Turner vignettes are not much larger than a thumb-print. Thanks to the recently perfected giclee process and the
computer allow enlargement to a degree in which Turner’s every single detail emerges with perfect clarity. Much skill is
required to manipulate the computer which lifts the image off the worn, close to 200 year old paper and “giclee’ ( giclee means
to ‘spit in French,) the pure line, on the finest archival paper available. The result – a perfect crisp image of unsurpassed
beauty – here shown for the first time, never before publicly shown!
Blog
Musical backgrounds: Vivaldi – Concerto for Lute, in D Major – Largo – composed in 1716.
English
