Book Description

J.M.W. Turner is probably the greatest painter Britain has ever produced. Disturbingly original and astonishingly prolific, he rose from the obscurity of a barber's son to bequeath a rich and complex legacy. Paintings such as Rain, Steam and Speed have become British icons, and the phrase "Turner sky" is known to students of art around the world.

Despite this fame, or perhaps because of it, Turner's work has often been misunderstood, his intentions simplified. Here, Sam Smiles investigates Turner's artistic and literary influences, his political views, and the extraordinary evolution of his approach and techniques. Examining how Turner produced effects that lay beyond the competence of other artists--dissolving form, rendering diaphanous expanses of light, and using color with the utmost subtlety and control--the author contradicts Turner's own claim that his only secret was "damned hard work."

In the process, Smiles retrieves the meaning of Turner's art from critical misconstruings. He finds in Turner not a recorder of light and landscape but a fascinating artist who foreshadowed modernism and used landscape to deliver profound ruminations on society, politics, technology, and the human condition. Turner's sophisticated artistic personality emerges, rendering his art more compelling than ever. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Not exactly the best book of Turner's work.
This book provides basic background information on Turner's progression as an artist, and it does contain a nice selection of Turner's landscapes. However, the reproductions are poor in quality, hardly doing the authentic works justice. ... Read more

Book Description

This beautiful book discusses the history of Turner`s famous painting, as well as the artist`s techniques and imagery and the significance of the painting for Turner and his contemporaries. ... Read more

Amazon.com

Turner on the Seine brings together all the watercolor sketches the artist made for his 1834 book of views of the River Seine, together with hundreds of black-and-white related images. It constitutes a companion volume to Ian Warrell's Turner on the Loire, the painter's other river-views project, and it is every bit as handsome. The range of visual styles impresses the viewer, along with the compositional perfection and luminous sense of light that Turner demonstrates. Some of these images carry the mark of classic Turner, but others would not look out of place in a collection of impressionist paintings; it is not surprising to learn that Pissarro and Monet admired these images enormously. Others still seem even more modern, as with the near-abstract Sail Boat at Rouen; in some, the pen work overlaying the watercolor strokes resembles the work of the most proficient illustrators, like Paul Hogarth.

It is hard to imagine an art book having higher production standards than this. The text is informative and sharply written; there is something to delight the eye on every page in black and white or color; and the reproduction of the plates is exquisite, particularly in the precision of the blue inks. --Adam Roberts, Amazon.co.uk ... Read more

Book Description

Now famous for their immediate impact of color, light, and atmospheric effect, the landscapes of Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) were at first the object of opposing critical claims: from one side the British artist was charged with painting "pictures of nothing and very like," from the other, with allowing too much "content" to eclipse his presentation of nature. Taking this paradox as its starting point, Kathleen Nicholson's richly illustrated book proposes a thorough revision of how we understand the enigmatic artist who revolutionized landscape painting. Advancing the growing interest in Turner's handling of content, without ignoring questions of style, Nicholson shows how Turner used the themes of antiquity to explore the ways natural imagery can embody meaning, and how he came to view interpretation itself as a primary subject. Nicholson maintains that by seeking themes in ancient myth, culture, and history, Turner was able to reinvest nature with new values and concepts, thereby accomplishing a genuinely modern revision of classical landscape in an early nineteenth-century idiom. His inquiry into the nature of meaning, she argues, led him to articulate a narrative that engaged the viewer in "reading" or interpreting both symbolic and purely visual imagery. Among the first to analyze systematically the themes treated in Turner's early sketchbooks, Nicholson traces the artist's understanding of a given legend, ancient author, or formal source as it developed over time, providing rare insight into the extent and character of his manipulation of subject matter. ... Read more