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Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth making
Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead.Turner was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left
Harwich) I842, 9I x I22 cm. Clore Gallery,
One of the most
extraordinary and daring of Turner’s pictures; end. wild and confused as it
appears, one as nearly approaching to actual fact as it is possible
for the hand of man to paint. Turner was not one who painted without
experience. Vast as his imaginary drawings were, there is not one which is
not based upon actual fact; the glorious reproduction in one complex image
of mental impressions of various truths under the influence of an unexampled
imagination. But here the image is more realistic, and the working of his
mind has not resulted in a picture of “bowery loveliness.” but of one of the
most terrible phenomena of nature—a snowstorm at sea. Nothing grieved Turner
more than the way this picture was received by the public. A critic compared
it to soapsuds and whitewash. “Soapsuds and whitewash!” Turner was heard to
repeat to himself. “What would they have, 1 wonder! What do they think the
sea ‘s like? I wish they ‘d been in it:
Turner once witnessed a
scene like this, and no entreaties could prevail upon him to go below; so he
was lashed to the mast for four hours, and saw it out. “I did not expect to
escape,” he skid, “but felt bound to record it if I dkI.’ There is something
of the infinity of nature in. this picture, which has no beginning and no
end; the sky is joined to the sea, the smoke to the cloud—the whole watery,
misty world is fused together, and the ship itself seems to be incorporated
with the elements. This is the truth of the picture, more strange than
fiction, and less easy to be believed by those “who have eyes and see not”
Ruskin's opinion of
this painting is that this is the grandest statement of sea motion,
mist and light that has ever been put on canvas.
The painting above is the central detail not from the Turner Snow Storm but from my
attempt for demonstration purposes. Note I bent the mask even more than
Turner's. I also put Turner tied to the mask, as he was said to have been!
Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps.
was the first picture with which Turner printed lines of poetry
in the catalogue with a credit to an 'MS' poems 'Fallacies of Hope'.
Turner's pictures were becoming arranged,
compositionally, around 'vortexes', in which the picture emanates from a
central structure in a series of sweeps, as above for example. He also experimented with new forms, such as squares and octagons.
His was always a deliberate in development. The painting reveals the
extent to which Turner sees the style of the brushwork itself as a factor
of the impact of the painting. |
