Turner. Horror and Delight. At LWL Museum für Kunst und Kultur.

Having entered the Royal Academy at the age of fourteen, Turner’s classes consisted mainly of drawing plaster casts of figures or, more rarely, live models. Lessons concentrated on historical painting, so we may assume his landscape painting skills were self-taught.

Turner undertook his first sketch trip when he was just sixteen. From then on, he was on the road almost every summer, first within England, Wales and Scotland, and later on the Continent as well, when the political situation permitted.

When Turner sees an interesting motive, he lets the carriage stop or gets off the horse. Meanwhile, the coachman sits on a boulder and waits just like the rest of the travel companions.Only on his return journey did Turner take the time to study the Old Masters in the Louvre in Paris.

Mount Rigi shimmers blue in the distance, wrapped in the golden yellow light of morning. High in the heavens a single star shines, which Turner scratched into the paper with a fingernail. More than thirty watercolours of the “Queen of the Mountains” bear witness to the British artist’s fascination with the rapidly changing light.

The Swiss myths about self-determination and resistance to foreign powers all played out around the Lake Lucerne. Here you will find the mythical site of the foundation of the Eidgenossenschaft or Confederation and the Rütli Meadow, and the Wilhelm Tell legend also took place here. Turner’s watercolour shows the town of Küssnacht.

On the way here from Immensee, the traveller passes through the “hollow way” made famous by Schiller’s play, William Tell: this is the place where the Swiss hero is said to have shot and killed the bailiff Gessler with a crossbow. In 1804 Friedrich Schiller’s play of he same time was premiered in Weimar by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and became an ideal tourist advertisement for Central Switzerland.

The middle classes became a powerful force in the early 19th century. People were increasingly able to travel and interested in visiting foreign countries. Thomas Cook organized the first package tour in England in 1841, and the first to the Alps in 1863, a new mode that was criticized from the outset. The scholar John Ruskin, art collector and the administrator of Turner’s estate, complained that Chamonix was becoming “a kind of Cremorne Gardens” and foresaw a bleak future for Lucerne as “a row of symmetrical hotels round the foot of the lake.”

And Turner returned. In 1819, 1833 and 1840, he spent a total of four weeks in the city on the water, producing more than five hundred sketches during this period.

A deep ravine. People falling into the abyss. Yet in the middle of the picture, the viewer’s gaze is drawn to the drama in the heavens. Turner connects what is dramatic in nature, and on the hazardous road, with human drama. Here, however, he has not painted an actual event, as there was no battle at Fort Roch in Val d’Aoste in 1796 when French troops led by Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Italy. Turner invented this battle mainly to reinforce the position of landscape painting within the hierarchy of genres.

For a long time in painting, landscape simply served as a setting for historical, mythological or biblical scenes. It only became a genre in itself during the Renaissance, and an independent motif in the 17th century. Yet the art of landscape painting did not reach its zenith until around 1800, with the advent of Romanticism, as nature took on the role of a pristine, ideal world in contrast to the dawning machine age. At the same time, publishers began commissioning picturesque landscapes as illustrations for popular books and travelogues.

The industrial revolution began in England and changed the world as of the mid-18th century. Scientific discoveries and technological inventions go hand in hand. The experimental physicist Michael Faraday (1791–1867) tinkered with electricity and magnetism, Humphry Davy (1778–1829) discovered new elements and William Herschel (1738–1822) unknown planets. The Royal Society of Natural Science was in the same building as the Royal Academy of Arts.

Lectures on technology were extremely popular and were disseminated immediately in printed form. Ideas and discoveries were discussed in the salons. Turner only had to go from one room to another so as to satisfy his scientific curiosity. He debated with Faraday on pigment recipes and was a close friend of the astronomer and mathematician Mary Somerville (1780–1872).

Gear wheels, cabbage heads and crockery—Turner painted a foundry as a dismal utility room around 1805. ln 1847 he overpainted the workshop, adding dazzling light and the bronze statue of the Duke of Wellington, just released from the casting mould. With this unconventional depiction, Turner literally showed hero worship in a new light. Between 1805 and 1847 colour schemes and modes of painting were clearly distinguished from one another. They elucidated Turner’s development from his early style, with its dismal shades, to his late oeuvre, in which brush movement adds dynamism to what is being depicted.

The wrecks in Tur­ner’s paint­ings are al­ways sail­ing ships. In ‘Fight­ing Te­mer­aire’ Tur­ner links the past with the fu­ture. The glo­ri­ous old war­ship can no longer sail on its own; it is be­ing towed up the Ri­ver Thames by a small com­pact steam­ship to be bro­ken up. In the past, Great Brit­ain ruled the waves; now it was a lead­ing in­dus­trial na­tion.

Steamships and locomotives are symbols of the modern world. Their sign is the cloud of smoke in the sky and their sound the stomping of engines. Turner was fascinated by the steam-driven transportation systems. In his marine paintings, depictions of ships on the high seas, he celebrated the triumph of steam power.

The essence of Turner’s paint­ing are the ef­fects of the dif­ferent light con­di­tions. Smoke, steam, mist, rain, foam — they all only come into their own through light, which veils the ob­jects to the ad­van­tage of an over­all at­mos­phere. Turner pre­sents the colours as light phe­no­mena and not features of things.

Air, smoke, clouds and water form a single blueish-grey mass in motion. In the visible rotating traces of the thrust of his paint application, Turner presents a parallel to the dynamism of nature. He depicts the cause and effect of the natural forces.

With the subtitle 'The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich', Turner himself initiated the rumour that he had himself tied to the ship’s mast so as to experience the storm at first hand. However, no ship of that name is known.

Through the story, Turner emphasised the act of experiencing weather with all one’s senses. Like the painter, the viewers too should feel, and not just see the storm. By shifting the perception to the centre of attention, he staged the sublime aspect of the steamship struggling against the storm.

Repeatedly Turner’s unusual art drew criticism and ridicule. He rarely made use of foodstuffs in his work, but certainly of unconventional tools, working his oil paintings and watercolours with his fingernail or the handle of his paintbrush. He was also interested in new colour pigments. In his early works he used organic and mineral paints. He also used industrial products as soon as they appeared on the market. Cobalt blue appeared in his clouds around 1810, chromium yellow around 1815 and emerald green around 1830. Towards the end of his life, Turner also adopted the newly invented tube paints.

In 1799 he became an associate member of the Academy having reached the prescribed age of 24. In 1802 he became a full member and was appointed professor in 1807. He worked at the Academy for 35 years, as professor for perspective and for a time as temporary director. His strong Cockney accent and his chaotic style, however, made his classes rather unpopular.

As Turner was well aware of the significance of his oeuvre, he began to hold back works. In 1825 he refused to sell the painting ‘Dido building Carthage’ of 1815 because it was counted among his masterpieces. The painting of his showroom reveals how that picture occupied a central position until his death. The presentation not only served to promote sales, but was also a show of his prowess. Turner used his last will and testament to consolidate his fame after death. He bequeathed about 300 oil paintings and 20,000 watercolours and drawings to the National Gallery, founded in 1824, on condition that a special gallery be built for them. According to his will, ‘Dido building Carthage’ was to be hung alongside the painting by Claude Lorrain whom he so admired.