A Sublime Celebration of J.M.W. Turner at 250

E arlier this month I was in New Haven to visit the Yale Center for British Art, newly reopened after an extraordinarily long period of pandemic lockdown — nearly two years — and, then, nearly three years to replace the roof and lighting. Regarding Tracey Emin’s feminist art now on display in the renovated museum, I noted that “one painting of her is enough” — less is more. But when it comes to J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), more is to be rewarded, given his sublime idiosyncrasy and a way with color and mist that’s boundless. J.M.W. Turner: Romance and Reality, the art center’s other premiere exhibition, is well worth a trip to New Haven. It’s a premiere in that, coming to its 50th anniversary in 2027, the Yale Center for British Art (or BAC) has never shown all 75 of its works by Turner at the same time. And April 23, a few short days from now, is the 250th anniversary of Turner’s birth. Yale owns the biggest and best collection of work by Turner outside of London, assembled by the BAC’s patron, Paul Mellon.

Romance and Reality is a good title for Turner, who is a star among the English Romantics, but “reality” links him to Whistler and Monet, each an icon for the art of real life. Turner descends aesthetically from the William and Mary era of ship-battle painters but also to gauzy, breezy Gainsborough and the stately works by Reynolds. The son of a London barber and wig maker, Turner was a prodigy. By 20, he was exhibiting at the Royal Academy, earning a living as a watercolorist with a fresh, anti-systematic approach. He was at the top of the British art establishment for 50 years, and not for his convention. By the 1840s, paintings such Squally Weather, a ship-in-a-storm scene, put us in the wettest and thickest of things. He was closer to an abstract painter than anyone before 1945, a hundred years later.

Romance and Reality is a very good exhibition on so many fronts, starting with a breadth of work that makes for a survey. As giants among artists go, Turner is not that linear. The BAC’s exhibition has two entrances, an unfortunate architectural tick of the place. One entrance starts with Turner’s early things, and the other makes the visitor meander, in the best possible way, among pictures that span decades. Turner painted rainbows around 1810, an erupting Vesuvius in 1820, seaside village scenes packed with people a few years later, then ocean disasters and back to diaphanous Swiss and Scottish lake pictures, abstract like his rainbows decades before. If anything, he shows, even as a teenager, a wizard’s talent in getting light from paint.

He traveled throughout Europe — a lot — and depicts old forests, the Kentish coast, Venice, and Rotterdam. Wherever there’s a stormy sea, you might find Turner. He did mythological and ancient history scenes, too. Nearly all of these subjects are in Romance and Reality. Between his sketches, paintings, and prints, if Turner was awake, he was making art.

The show’s presented in loose sections, including Color, Light, and Place; Experimentation in Print; Maritime Visions; and Atmospheric Topographies. Yes, he’s a topographical artist in that, usually, we know the scene he’s painting. The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed, from 1818, at 62 by 92 inches the whopper in the show, is topographically correct in showing the Rotterdam waterfront. Turner’s a great ship portraitist, too. The sections are general enough to put our imaginations to work and take from Turner’s variousness what we will. That’s good. The BAC is an educational institution that wants us to think for ourselves.

For me, Turner is the most vaporous of painters. Staffa, Fingal’s Cave, from 1832, and Wreckers — Coast of Northumberland with a Steam Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore, from 1834, are storm scenes where he forms waves, people, ships, and distant architecture by mist, fog, clouds, and steam.

Staffa was, then, an uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland. Turner’s print version illustrates a collection of Walter Scott poems. Near the Isle of Mull, Staffa has to be considered Britain’s Wild West, so it’s a good subject for Romantics like Turner and Scott. It’s inscrutable and too wild to obey the laws of reason, yet Turner contrasts Fingal’s Cave, looming like a prehistoric totem, against the modern steam ship.

Turner is famous, and notorious in his lifetime, for color. For decades Turner’s palette included more than a few secret sauces. Chrome yellows, both bright and opaque — depending on their chemical content, sometimes lemon, sometimes orange — add dazzle to pictures like The Dort Packet-Boat. But, alas, the early, synthetic chrome yellows Turner used tended to darken over time. Radiant on the wall when they were first displayed, they seemed less so after a few years, and owners noticed. Turner sometimes retouched a picture if, after seeing it in a group show, he thought that a painting by another artist nearby made it less incandescent or glittery or beaming or less effective in whatever way he wanted. He’d tart up his picture. Over years, the new paint could flake or peel. Condition is a big problem with Turner.

Still, Turner’s colors can explode or glow or enchant, depending on his goals and techniques to achieve them. The ultramarine and emerald green in Lake Avernus: Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl, from around 1814, are velvety enough to take us back to dreamy mythical times. In some of his watercolors, he sponges and rubs the paper to deliver the texture he wants. He used his right thumbnail to scratch into watercolor, exposing the white paper when he wanted a passage of brilliant light. His watercolor washes thin as he aims for perfect evanescence. In Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne: Morning, painted around 1845 and one of the latest things in the show, Turner seems to want to paint light, with the forms of hills at their most evocative. Turner has many great fans, but his contemporary critics faulted him for what some called “indistinctness.” This style, though, led him to be revered by Monet, Pissarro, and many other Impressionists.

The show’s book, which is very good, is the first of a new series done by the BAC with abundant illustrations and focused themes. It serves as the catalogue for Romance and Reality, but it’s more all-purpose. Ian Warrell wrote the first essay, considering themes in Turner’s work decade by decade. He was the curator of British art at the Tate, which had jurisdiction over Turner’s bequest to Britain of hundreds of paintings and thousands of sketches. Gillian Forrester, the longtime senior curator of prints and drawings at the BAC, wrote an essay on Turner’s prints. Both essays are useful for scholars as well as generalists.

Turner was a fascinating, experimental printmaker and pushed mezzotint, line engraving, etching, drypoint, and chromolithography to new limits. With 2,000 Turner prints in the BAC’s collection, it had a tough choice of what to exhibit. Turner, I learned in the book, might have been vinegary, but to get the effects he wanted in translating his paintings to prints, he needed to work closely and well with engravers, publishers, and print dealers. He wasn’t the isolated genius he’s thought to have been. Though he’d been a cranky invalid for some years by the time he died in 1851, I think he’d have enjoyed knowing that the BAC was hosting such an elegant, illuminating 250th in his honor.