What's most striking about the 19th-century paintings of JMW Turner is how modern they look, writes Eileen Battersby
Each year, throughout the month of January when the light is at its weakest, 36 19th-century watercolours are exhibited by the National Gallery of Ireland. Comparable to the winter solstice at Newgrange, the annual viewing of these watercolours has become something of a ritual.
The works - delicate and subtle, yet vibrant with light and colour and possessed of unexpected power - are by a revolutionary artist whose influence may be traced down through the impressionists and on to the Latvian-born American expressionist Mark Rothko. The artistic legacy of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) is lasting, complex and contentious - contentious because there are so many aspects to the work of the great painter of seascapes, landscapes and classical views, who completed more than 500 oil paintings and thousands of watercolours and sketches.
In 1900, English Quaker art connoisseur Henry Vaughan (1808-1899) bequeathed 31 watercolours to the National Gallery on the condition that the works be exhibited only in January. The National Gallery later acquired an additional five works, the most recent of which, The Castellated Rhine (1832), was bequeathed by the late Lady Beit in 2000.
From 1901, the works have been shown annually. Famed for his dramatic and innovative use of colour (indeed, in his lifetime he was criticised for using too much colour), Turner was a driven professional artist who placed his work above all else.
Born in 1775, the son of a London barber and wig-maker who had left his native Devon a decade before the future artist's birth, Turner grew up in the Covent Garden area of London. His father encouraged the boy's talent for drawing and it was obvious that William Turner was destined for greatness. As an artist he was shaped by self-belief as much as by genius. This confidence is evident from the expression he wears in the famous self-portrait painted by him in around 1798 when he was 23 or 24 years of age and soon to become an Associate of the Royal Academy, becoming a full Academician in 1802, when still only 27.
To consider the work of Monet is to see the reflection cast by Turner, who had explored the French artist's interest in the effect of colour on light almost a century earlier.
The first thing that strikes you when you see Turner works such as Passau at the Confluence of the Rivers Inn and Danube (1840) - painted the year of Monet's birth - and Bellinzona with the Fortresses of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden (1842) is how modern they look. The same might be said for most of the Vaughan watercolours and for many of Turner's other works, including many of the Petworth interior paintings.
There was another side to Turner - that of the painter of classical scenes of antiquities and mythological themes. He was a classical artist and a natural intellectual. Turner's independent mind certainly affected his work, which is shaped by his response to places he visited and events he witnessed.
TRAVEL WAS CENTRAL to Turner's vision. At a time when travel was a difficult undertaking he went on some 56 tours, amassing a collection of more than 300 sketch books, which contain about 10,000 sketches and studies. There is no doubt that he knew the physical theatre of Europe and was drawn to Germany, Austria and Switzerland as well as to Italy, and most specifically Venice.
Plotting his sketching trips with the precision of a military campaigner, he was as forgetful as the most deliberate often are.
He was the father of two daughters by a woman he didn't marry; indeed, although he had relationships he never married. Indifferent to his mother, who was declared insane when he was already famous and died unmourned by either him or his father - with whom he lived when not travelling until the old man's death at the age of 85 - Turner was an unusual young man who became more eccentric with age. Visitors to his once-famous study gallery were appalled by the squalor. He didn't write letters and tended to speak his mind. He needed companionship, but enjoyed solitude and the temporary friendships made while travelling. Equally, the Royal Academy was a lifelong support for him, he lectured there and exhibited until the year before his death in 1851.
While young he travelled England, Scotland and Wales; his love of country was reflected in his romantic approach, but there was also the practical reality that this was a time of war, so travel to the Continent was not possible. By 1817, he was eager to take advantage of the peace following the Napoleonic Wars, and explored Europe with an interest bordering on hunger. Turner, a contemporary of the American bird artist John James Audubon, was a man of the Regency period who lived on into the Victorian.
The theme of this year's exhibition is "Turner on Tour", and in a lively lecture delivered on New Year's Day, the National Gallery's curator of British art, Adrian Le Harivel, placed Turner in the context of Jane Austen's world.
Having benefited from the slow-moving 18th-century transport dominated by horse-drawn carriages and slow boats, Turner would later experience the revolution in travel that arrived with the invention of steam - he would juxtapose the steamboat with the sailing vessels that dominated his earlier work. From the mountains of Britain he moved to those of Switzerland. Scenes from the Liber Studiorum print series, which was published from 1807 and was to prove the major engraving project of his career, are also included in the exhibition.
From the dramatic storm scenes to the celebrations of light that are the Venetian watercolours painted from three visits made over a 30-year period, Turner used colour as an expression of mood as much as a play of light.
Turner evokes the serenity of nature and also its menace and rage. His claim to be the finest English painter remains secure. There are many reasons.
ANY ATTEMPT TO understand this artist of contrast and changing personality may be helped by noting an effusive though perceptive diary entry written by the young John Ruskin on the night in 1840 when he first met Turner, who was then 65 and whose art Ruskin had already admired and famously defended from attack some four years earlier: "Introduced today to the man who beyond all doubt is the greatest of the age; greatest in every faculty of the imagination, in every branch of scenic knowledge; at once the painter and poet of the day, JMW Turner.
"Everybody had described him as a coarse, boorish, unintellectual, vulgar. This I knew to be impossible. I found in him a somewhat eccentric, keen-mannered, matter-of-fact, English-minded gentleman: good-natured evidently, bad-tempered evidently, hating humbug of all sorts, shrewd, perhaps a little selfish, highly intellectual, the powers of his mind not brought out with any delight in their manifestation, or intention of display, but flashing out occasionally in a word or a look."
On Tour with Turner continues at the National Gallery until Jan 31. See James Hamilton's biography, Turner: A Life (Hodder & Stoughton, 1997)