JMW Turner Flashcards
When was The Fighting Termeraire painted?
1839
What is JMW Turners full name?
Joseph Mallard William Turner
What style of artists was Turner admired by?
What change in Art did he foreshadow?
The Impressionists and American Abstract Expressionists.
Turn towards abstraction, many decades after his death.
Where was Turner born?
When was his first art shown in the Royal Academy?
Covent Garden
15 (watercolour) with a oil painting several years later
Two things critics said of Turner?
Unfinished style.
Painted with mustard due to his love of yellow hues.
Why does the Turner Prize , prize for modern art, bare his name?
Celebrate the tenacity with which he departed from the institutional norms of his day.
Apart from the ships themselves, What part of the marine scenes did Turner seem obsessed with?
Effects of light on sea and sky.
What’s the story behind Temeraire?
- integeral ship in Trafalgar 1805
- drew fire away from HMS Victory and captured 2 French ships, lashed to its sides.
- then supply ship
- 23 years later too old so scrapped for wood.
- nailed were ‘pulled out like teeth from wood’
- painting depicts dragged up Thames to be scrapped.
What is ‘wrong’ with The Téméraire?
It’s sailing the wrong way. Sailing away from setting sun rather than into! Turner prepared to alter truth to create compelling visual metaphor.
What is téméraire considered ‘elegy to’?
How do the sun and moon renforce this?
Old British Naval force.
Tiny modern steam tug pulling away the hulking relic of ‘the age of sail’.
Funereal backdrop. Final procession of once-great oceanic force.
How is Temeraire hopeful?
Final message? How can we relate?
Reflection of tug is as big as Temeraire.
Lament for grand glories of past as sail is replaced by coal.
Old gives way to new, but not without a sense of loss.
