Rivalries among the Masters

Happily for me, a recent visit to London coincided with the showing of “Turner and the Masters” at the Tate Gallery, Millbank. The exhibition ends there on January 31 but then travels on to Paris (Grand Palais, February 22 to May 24) and Madrid (Prado, June 22 to September 19).

Although the show is intended to be thematic—or even didactic—dealing with the influence other major painters had on Turner’s development and the feelings of professional rivalry he is believed to have felt towards many of them, any exhibition involving the great Joseph Mallord William Turner is guaranteed to be a visual feast. This is the sort of show we see too seldom in Australia.

Just how prodigiously gifted Turner was was emphasised further for me at the time of my visit by a simultaneous showing at the Tate Gallery, Millbank, of works by the four short-listed contestants for the 2009 Turner Prize—an event which not only usurps the name of Britain’s most famous artist but seems designed to insult his memory. As with so much work by younger artists today, the offerings of the four contestants provide scant visual evidence to support the inflated verbal claims made for them.

No such criticism could ever have been levelled at Turner or at those whose work he sought to emulate or transcend. “Turner and the Masters” includes over 100 works, usually in pairings which attempt to demonstrate obvious influences or rivalry. Most such pairings make admirable visual sense. Indeed on occasion they feature identical topography, as with The Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen painted by Turner in 1806 and by Philip James de Loutherbourg some eighteen years earlier.

Apart from rivalries conducted with such direct British contemporaries as John Constable, Thomas Girtin and David Wilkie, Turner consciously competed with painters of earlier eras whose work was admired especially in Britain—and, no less to the point, which fetched very high prices there.

His own extensive and ambitious travels aside, which enabled him to visit foreign collections, Turner was otherwise highly dependent on the tastes of Britain’s aristocracy in terms of what else he could view directly.

For the foregoing reasons those he regarded as his overseas rivals tended to be Dutch, French and Italian painters rather than any of the Spanish masters. European wars curtailed and inhibited travel but it is interesting to know that when a Spanish master—Francisco de Goya—finally saw work by a British one—John Constable—he was apparently unimpressed although The Hay-Wain had just won a Gold Medal at the Paris Salon of 1824.

Turner rightly admired two of the greatest European masters—Rembrandt and Titian—yet seems to have been largely or wholly unaware of the third member of this triumvirate, Diego Velazquez, whose work was admittedly very little known outside Spain until the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Velazquez himself was much influenced in his handling of paint by Titian and other Venetian masters, whose work he saw for the first time on his initial visit to Italy in 1629–31.

In contrast to Turner, John Constable never travelled outside Britain. In a catalogue for the magnificent Tate Gallery exhibition of Constable’s work in 1991 a commentator compared the great steed in Constable’s The Leaping Horse with the marvellous prancing equine in Velazquez’s portrait of his patron Count-Duke Olivares on horseback, although Constable, of course, never saw this painting.

While we can access images so easily today from almost any country in the world it is worth remembering how recent this facility is. Thus I have often wondered what Turner might have thought of Velazquez’s youthful masterpiece The Surrender of Breda 1634–35 if he had ever seen it, since the sobriety of the astonishing distant landscape of that picture contrasts so sharply with the sometimes febrile nature of Turner’s own achievements in that area.

Velazquez, we know, admired Peter Paul Rubens, whom he met in 1628 when Rubens visited the Spanish court. Turner, surprisingly, was a less committed admirer of Rubens, even stating once in a lecture that Rubens could not be content with “the bare simplicity of pastoral scenery or the immutable laws of nature’s light and shade” and so “threw around his tints like a bunch of flowers”, thus sacrificing truth for the sake of sheer colouristic bravura. Coming from Turner, this criticism of Rubens seems inappropriate to say the least. I am reminded of the late Francis Bacon, who remarked to me once that Henry Moore’s figure drawings were “utterly grotesque”.

Turner began his serious studies at the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1789 at the age of fourteen. That year is famous of course for a rather more compelling reason: the outbreak of the French Revolution. That event, however, brought an unexpected benefit to Britain’s artists and art students when a huge influx of works of art arrived in London to save them from falling into revolutionary hands.

If Turner truly were, as many believe, the finest artist Britain has ever produced, the significance of his starting his serious studies at fourteen seems worthy of notice. Velazquez began a professional apprenticeship at an even younger age—eleven—and by the age of seventeen was acknowledged as a master by being made a member of the Guild of St Luke.

If contemporary society were genuinely intent on producing great artists, why do such historical precedents remain so generally unacknowledged? After all, world-class players of musical instruments—as well as future tennis champions—begin their serious studies at even younger ages. Could the reason be that we no longer associate artistic excellence with demonstrable skills?

Here is a question which all connected with the visual arts ought to ask themselves much more frequently than most do and not merely when forced to address the matter by exhibitions such as this one. Who today possesses the skill Turner exhibited at the age of twenty-two in his Interior of Durham Cathedral of 1798?

Initially Turner set out to emulate the kind of idealised classical landscapes made popular by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, yet when he chose to be he was equally adept at challenging the more sober and less idealised landscapes and seascapes of Jacob van Ruisdael, in which nature is more often seen as threatening than benign.

In the view of most cultural historians the eighteenth century, sandwiched as it was between centuries of the highest achievement in the visual arts—the seventeenth and nineteenth—is more rightly revered for its music than for its painting, although it did throw up talents of the stature of Chardin and Gainsborough. However, the artist most generally associated with the Rococo period and its leading exponent was the sadly short-lived Jean-Antoine Watteau, whose mysterious, haunting and romantic works struck a strong personal chord with Turner. Like Turner, Watteau influenced future generations of artists through both sentiment and technique—especially, perhaps, through juxtaposing flecks of colour, a method taken up with enthusiasm later on by Georges Seurat and by at least some of the Impressionists.

As an artist whose main years of achievement spanned the first half of the nineteenth century, Turner’s career stood at an interesting cultural crossroads. Behind him lay the glories of the Renaissance, Venetian painting and the so-called Grand Style which was meant to embody the highest possible areas of achievement in pictorial art, in both subject matter and mode of handling.

Yet within only four years of Turner’s death in 1851 we find Gustave Courbet rejecting grandiose artistic themes altogether in favour of an art based on the seemingly prosaic and everyday. Significantly, when Courbet opened a pavilion of his work at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855 it bore the title Le Realisme.

While Turner tended to dismiss the “mere” reproduction of appearances, in particular, and topographical landscape painting in general, the mood in France at least had thus turned already against grandiosity—and indeed pomposity—in art through a return by artists to natural sources. Before Turner was dead, the so-called proto-Impressionists of the Barbizon School were sketching directly from nature and rejecting anything high-flown in a tradition inherited jointly from Dutch painting and from the growing influence of Turner’s direct English contemporary John Constable.

Unlike Constable, Turner was an inveterate showman who courted fame and success with an energy generally associated with prominent artists of more recent times. Surprisingly, in view of this, Turner received only one royal commission: to commemorate the victory of the English fleet at Trafalgar, a commission designed to hang alongside an equally enormous canvas by his French-trained rival de Loutherbourg. Turner’s work attracted much criticism from literal-minded naval officers, who objected endlessly to matters of detail while overlooking the majesty and presence of a work measuring nearly three metres by four. Today it is probably hard for many to realise how overwhelming national pride was in Nelson’s victory over the combined fleets of France and Spain. Even harder, perhaps, in an age of the e-mail, is the realisation of how long news of the great victory took to reach London. The news was conveyed, in fact, through the despatch of a fast frigate which took days to reach Britain’s nearest landfall: the Cornish town of Penzance. From there bonfires were lit as a pre-arranged signal at ten-mile intervals all the way to London nearly 300 miles away.

In what way, if any, does “Turner and the Masters” aid our greater understanding of its central subject? In the opinion of at least one notable Turner scholar, Selby Whittingham, the present show aims especially to discredit the view proposed by Lawrence Gowing’s Turner exhibition of 1966 in New York that Turner was a precursor of abstractionism. Indeed, if the present show achieves nothing more than dismissal of that particular canard its effect should be welcomed.

For me, however, a principal effect of the show was almost certainly unintended. By its central emphasis on Turner’s great technical facility and professional competitiveness, the show highlights a central weakness in Turner’s oeuvre which is easily overlooked. In short, by demonstrating his dazzling technical competence time and again in transcending the art of others, is there something Turner reveals unintentionally about himself? A lack of a readily identifiable personal vision or standpoint perhaps?

Significantly for an artist who enjoyed selling and marketing his work, there was one painting that remained always in Turner’s own possession: the superb, deeply moving and widely loved seascape known popularly as The Fighting Temeraire. In this majestic work, the measures of sentiment and skill attain the same levels of palpability—a level of palpability, in fact, which is almost always present in the paintings of Turner’s direct contemporary and rival John Constable.

What is never in doubt in Constable’s work is the personal love he felt for its subject matter, whether parochial or otherwise. Such unabashed affection for countryside in itself is found much less frequently in Turner yet was once one of the great constants of the British national character. Indeed, research has shown how strongly such sentiment featured in the patriotism shown by the British people during two world wars.

Was Turner truly Britain’s greatest painter? Over the years I have debated this question a number of times with prominent British artists, some of whom, at least, now regard Constable as Turner’s superior—although I doubt whether such a view is widely held yet outside Britain.

Regrettably it is the view of many that major artistic reputations are exempt, somehow, from debate. However, if this were the case we would still be stuck with the view, which prevailed for two centuries after his death, that Jan Vermeer was merely one of the eighty so-called “little masters” of Dutch seventeenth-century art rather than someone thought of now as being second only to Rembrandt in that era.

Occasionally unkind fate may also play a role in apparent distortions of history. Thus the painter I consider to have been the finest female practitioner of the twentieth century still fails to merit a mention in many standard textbooks, such as the American academic Whitney Chadwick’s Women, Art and Society (Thames & Hudson, 1990) which in the course of nearly 400 pages lists 500 women artists but omits entirely to mention Lotte Laserstein.

Laserstein was the first woman to be admitted to the Berlin Academy and seemed well set for a notable career before she was exiled from Germany by Hitler in 1937 for the “crime” of having one Jewish grandparent. By fleeing to nearby but artistically unfashionable Sweden, which remained neutral during the Second World War, Laserstein managed to preserve her life but effectively buried a burgeoning international career. I was fortunate enough to see her work for the first time in London in 1987.