Travels with Mr Turner

Published on Thursday 19 March 2009 10:34

WINTER 1819. A COACH CROSSING the Alps overturns in the snow. The passengers shiver by their salvaged luggage. All except one, who is calmly sketching the wreckage. JMW Turner was a man with a keen eye for drama in all its forms. He was also fizzing with creative energy. He had, after all, just discovered Italy.

The artist was on his way back from his first extensive Italian tour. His itinerary looks ambitious even to modern eyes: Turin, Milan, Verona, Padua, Venice, Bologna, and so on, down to Rome, then on to Naples and Sorrento. Travel was by stagecoach, slow, expensive and dangerous. Turner went everywhere with a sword concealed in his umbrella – just in case.

As the coach bumped along, he drew constantly. On that trip alone, he filled 23 sketchbooks. He drank in the landscape as if quenching a thirst. Though he had travelled extensively in the UK, this was something new: the light, the scenery, the sense of the ancient past.

Coach crash notwithstanding, Turner arrived back in London in February, just two months before the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy. Art historians believe he worked day and night to finish Rome, from the Vatican, a stunning painting infused with his new experiences. It was the first in a line of Italian masterpieces which he would make for the rest of his life.

That painting will be in Scotland this spring for Turner & Italy, the most extensive Turner exhibition ever held north of the Border. Bringing together pictures from as far afield as Washington DC and Melbourne, Australia, it aims for the first time to tell the full story of Turner's long and complex relationship with Italy.

"When people think about Turner and Italy, they tend to think about Venice, and quite rightly, because his Venetian works were wonderful," says Christopher Baker, deputy director of the National Gallery of Scotland and show organiser. "But it's only part of the story. It's really Rome that dominated his oil paintings from 1819 to the 1830s. Also, you need to look at the whole process, from when he's dreaming about Italy in the 1790s up to his final visits when he's a grand old man in the 1840s."

Turner first set sail for Europe in 1802 when a brief ceasefire in the Napoleonic wars made travel safer. Small boats did a roaring trade ferrying cultural tourists across the channel. The crossing took five hours, and was often rough: a margin note in Turner's sketchbook reads, "Nearly swampt". Turner spent time in Paris, then travelled on through Switzerland and across the Italian border to Aosta, a striking town with Roman ruins in the shadow of the mountains, before having to return to England.

That he wanted to go was hardly surprising. Students of art in the late 18th century were encouraged to look to Italy as the cradle of the Renaissance. What is remarkable is that he made the 1,200-mile journey seven times, regardless of perilous Alpine crossings, coach crashes on icy roads and the ever-present threat of bandits.

"That is quite amazing," says Baker. "He really did fall in love with Italy. For our purposes, what's so wonderful is that his Italian trips run right through his career, so by looking at his Italian work you get a real sense of how his art evolves, from early, quite conventional pictures to the great radical paintings of his maturity."

When he first set foot in the Val d'Aosta, Turner was 28 and had already come a long way. The son of a barber from Covent Garden, whose first watercolours were displayed for sale in the window of his father's shop, he had gone on to become the youngest man ever to be elected to membership of the Royal Academy. He was a precocious talent, given to challenging his fellow academicians and earning, at one point, the nickname "the over-Turner".

"He stirred things up in the way you might expect a 20th-century artist to do," says Baker. "He had an extraordinary sense of self-possession and self-belief. By the time he went to France and Italy, he had already secured major patronage. It shows how, as a very young man, and against all expectations and all the odds, he made travel a very important part of what he did."

It would be 17 more years before circumstances allowed Turner to return to Italy, but that didn't stop him yearning. He read Virgil, Cicero and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, published in bestselling instalments between 1812 and 1818. He painted scenes of Roman myth and history, infusing them with English landscapes but, one suspects, dreaming of Italian ones.

In 1819, he planned his trip with care, poring over guide books and history books (his library forms part of the exhibition). Never a great linguist, he arrived in Rome with a key phrase written out carefully in his sketchbook: "Dove a la Academia dei belli Arte" (Where is the Academy?).

He was welcomed in Rome by the community of ex-pats and travellers and drawn into their vibrant social life. He met the Italian sculptor Canova, who admired his work and sponsored him to become a member of the Roman Academy, the Accademia di San Luca. There is no doubt that he enjoyed Rome a great deal.

"There is a holiday element, if you like, an element of escape," says Baker. "It was a thriving place to be in terms of contemporary painting and sculpture. It had everything – great social life, good weather, lots of history, good food. In one sense, the reasons for going haven't changed!"

But Turner also had a more serious artistic purpose. The Britain he had left was undergoing rapid industrialisation. In Italy, where contemporary life unfolded next to the ruins of the ancient past, he was able to look at the wider arc of human history. "He arguably uses Italy more than his British subjects to think about the great sweep of history, how civilisations rise and fall," says Baker. "He did have great ambitions, he was thinking about the large subjects, about where we fit into the scheme of history, and Italy allowed him to do that."

Interestingly, both aspects added to the appeal of his work. Though he produced works of stunning originality, Turner rarely acted without an eye to the market. He instinctively understood the value of publicising his work, making a splash annually at the Royal Academy, and cultivating a wider market through engravings of his watercolours.

"He was a canny businessman," says Baker. "You couldn't go to Turner and say, 'I want a painting of this'. He'd work up some ideas, exhibit them at the Royal Academy and they'd be bought from the Academy walls. It was very clever, of course, because he gets the exposure as well as the sale. Often, he would purposely not finish a painting, take it to the Academy, hang it on the wall – much to everyone's bemusement – and then in the last day or two, or the last few hours, bring it to a high level of finish. It was showmanship, really.

"He also knew to spread his reputation. It wasn't good enough to use an exhibition space, he had to produce watercolours which were engraved and appeared in books and prints and were spread all over Europe. Had he been about today he'd have used the internet."

Both as a businessman and as an artist, he understood the value of showing the familiar in a new light. Despite the fact that many artists before him had been to Italy, he did not repeat their work. Moreover, even after seven trips, he did not repeat himself.

In Venice in 1840, for example, he painted a watercolour of his bedroom in the Hotel Europa, the campanile of St Marks just visible through the window. "It's a very radical, almost modern way of looking at what could be a hackneyed subject," says Baker. "I think Italy allows him to push back the boundaries. He can see himself as part of a great artistic tradition, but he's also challenging that tradition. He's constantly saying: 'I'm so good I can paint this afresh'.

"The other thing that illustrates how radical and original he was is that he doesn't inspire followers. He is arguably Britain's greatest 19th-century artist, but there are not lots of Turner-esque imitators." Critics tended to be admiring, if occasionally baffled. When two of his later Italian paintings were shown at the RSA in Edinburgh in 1845, The Scotsman critic tactfully wrote that Mr Turner "succeeds in producing brilliant things … which …men may not fully comprehend, but cannot help admiring."

It was only in his last years, with the security of a considerable fortune behind him, that Turner decided to paint some works which ignored the market. His late paintings, which are now seen as masterpieces anticipating Impressionism and even abstraction, were so radical in his lifetime that they were virtually unsaleable. But he painted them anyway, for himself, the triumphant culmination of his radical career.

In one, he paints the Val , the first part of Italy he ever saw, which he visited again in 1836 with Scottish friend and patron Munro of Novar, and for a final time in 1843. A couple of years before he died, he painted it as a swirl of red-gold and white, the forms of the land no more than a suggestion.

"It's an extraordinary picture, almost totally abstracted, a picture about the mountains and the sky where they're almost merged into this abstract single phenomenon," says Baker. "I think what we're looking at is a private picture which brings together these earlier experiences, almost like a dream picture, a recollection.

"Right at the end of his life, he's recalling these very important experiences from his earlier relationship with Italy, pulling together these personal recollections going back 50 years."

&#149 Turner & Italy is at the National Galleries Complex, Edinburgh, 27 March until 7 June.

A life in seven journeys

1802: Turner takes his first journey to Italy, aged 27. He reaches only as far as Aosta near the Swiss border but it makes a great impression on him.

1819: The artist makes a six-month tour of Italy, to Turin, Verona, Padua, Venice and as far south as Naples, Sorrento and Amalfi, as well as to Rome for the first time. He is elected member of the Accademia di San Luca through Canova's sponsorship.

1828: Turner travels to Italy via Marseille and Nice. He takes a studio in Rome and exhibits paintings at Palazzo Trulli, but his radical painting technique is widely criticised. He has a long and difficult journey home when his coach skids off the road on ice on the way to Bologna.

1833: Turner travels down the Rhine and Danube to Munich and Vienna, then on through Switzerland to Venice.

1836: The artist tours France, Switzerland and the Val d'Aosta with Scottish landowner and collector Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro of Novar, who was his patron and also an amateur painter. Turner corrects his work and offers tuition as they travel.

1840: He travels to Rotterdam, down the Rhine and on to Venice, returning through Munich and Coburg. This trip may have inspired his masterpiece Approach to Venice, which was exhibited at the Academy in 1844.

1843: He visits the Tyrol and the Val d'Aosta for the last time, aged 69. He dies in 1851.