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Scholz, Joachim
2012.
Research in Consumer Behavior.
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Article contents
Humanity and Nature in the Steamboat Paintings of J.M.W. Turner*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
The year 1851 witnessed the Great Exhibition, Britain's celebration of technological achievement. Thousands of curious and excited visitors from the world over flocked to Joseph Paxton's futuristic Crystal Palace to marvel at the various exhibits which underscored, not only Britain's commercial and industrial preeminence, but also the Victorian faith in progress and the triumph of the machine.
Less noticed, late that same year, was the passing of one of the most perceptive observers of the new age, the veteran artist J.M.W. Turner. This great English Romantic, famed for his paintings of bucolic landscapes, storms at sea, and Alpine avalanches, also had drawn significant inspiration from the new forces which were then rapidly transforming Britain and the world. A notable body of his work, particularly the efforts of his later career, exist as complex visual commentaries on the reality and the meaning of nineteenth century industrialism. Watercolors of blackened mills, polluted skies, and steam locomotion capture the face of change, while great oils such as The Fighting Temeraire and Snow Storm—Steam–Boat off a Harbour's Mouth symbolize a dynamic new age.
- Type
- The 1985 Denis Bethell Prize Essay of the Charles Homer Haskins Society
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- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1986
Footnotes
*
A version of this essay was presented to a meeting of the Turner Society, in London, at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Summer 1984. For illustrations of Turner works discussed in this article but not reproduced, see the parenthetical references throughout the text, to the following: for watercolors, Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner. His Art and Life (New York, 1979), cited as Wilton with page and catalogue number; and for paintings, Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, Plates (New Haven, revised ed., 1984), cited as Butlin and Joll with the plate number.
References
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4 Spratt, H.P., Handbook of the Collections Illustrating Merchant Steamers and Motorships, Science Museum. Part II, Descriptive Catalogue (London, 1968), pp. 91–92Google Scholar. The 1813 sketch of the “Comet” by William Daniell is reproduced in Klingender, F.D., Art and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1948Google Scholar; revised ed., New York, 1970), p. 250. Klingender mistakenly pre-dates the “Comet's” launching by one year, p. 107.
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23 Hawes, in “Turner's Fighting Temeraire,” calls this painting “an elegy for the Romantic era, replaced by a hard, utilitarian age,” without recognizing the Romantic appeal, for an artist like Turner, of significant aspects of this new era.
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30 I am grateful to Andrew Wilton for this observation on Turner's use of black.
31 The Times, 6 May 1842, supplement.
32 Earlier, in 1830, Turner had used a similar device in Dudley, Worcestershire, a watercolor featuring a small, black factory in which the building's hidden fire and extruded smoke draw the viewer towards it and away from the picturesque castle on the hill above. See illustration in Wilton, , J.M.W. Turner, p. 180Google Scholar. A similar indication of human presence, indicated with a touch of yellow, has been pointed out in the steamer of Staffa-Fingal's Cave by Paulson, Ronald in Literary Landscape: Turner and Constable (New Haven, 1982), p. 97Google Scholar, although there it hardly draws the eye inward.
33 Ruskin, , Works, 36:382Google Scholar.
34 Butlin and Joll, Text, p. 206.
35 Two years later the steamer “Forfarshire” was wrecked off the Fame Islands just north of Dunstanburgh. Turner's contemporary, J. W. Carmichael, painted the event as the ship lay on her side, with the famous Victorian heroine Grace Darling and her father rushing to the rescue. See Boase, T.S.R., “Shipwrecks in English Romantic Painting,” Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes 22 (1959): 343CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a description of this event. Carmichael's painting is reproduced in Montgomery, W.A. and Scott, M., Grace Darling (Seahouses, Northumberland, 1981), p. 18Google Scholar.
36 Gage, John, ed., Collected Correspondence of J.M.W. Turner (Oxford, 1980), pp. 209–210Google Scholar. Despite the dangers alluded to in this letter as well as the ominous sky pictured in the painting, Hawes nevertheless sees the steamer “advancing toward us confidently …” (“Turner's Fighting Temeraire,” p. 33).
37 Morning Herald 7 May 1832, p. 3Google Scholar. Paulson, , Literary Landscape, p. 97Google Scholar, in an interesting analysis of this work, sees the steamer as a symbol of human activity “pitted against the forces of nature.” It must be emphasized, however, that humanity and the steamer will be defeated.
38 The date, title, and setting of this watercolor has been the subject of some disagreement. In a 1977 exhibition it was labelled A Paddle-Steamer in a Storm, ca. 1830 (?), “possibly off the coast of Britain.” See White, Christopher, English Landscape 1630-1860 (New Haven, 1977), p. 81Google Scholar. More recently, Wilton has placed it on Lake Lucerne and assigned it the title and approximate date used here (J.M.W. Turner, p. 478, no. 1484).
39 Walker, , Turner, p. 2Google Scholar.
40 Butlin and Joll, Text, p. 239.
41 Athenaeum, 6 February 1841, p. 118Google ScholarPubMed. There is an 1852 chromolithograph of this painting by Robert Carrick in which two semicircular paddlewheels are clearly visible on the ship to the left, while on its companion, a crew is depicted in detail on the stern.
42 See Butlin, Martin and Wilton, Andrew, Turner, 1775-1851 (London, 1974), p. 170Google Scholar, for the relationship of this vortex to that of Snowstorm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth.
43 Note also the steamer's twisted smoke trail, pressed by wind and heat, in the watercolor Fire at Fennings Wharf, on the Thames at Bermondsey, c. 1836, now at Manchester. The arrangement is almost identical to Snowstorm. See the production of this watercolor in Wilton, p. 420, no. 1013.
44 Athenaeum, 14 May 1842, p. 433Google ScholarPubMed.
45 Blackwood's (Edinburgh) Magazine, July 1842, p. 30.Google ScholarPubMed; Art Union, 1 June 1842, p. 123Google ScholarPubMed.
46 Ruskin, , Works, 13: 162Google Scholar. It has been suggested recently that Turner may not have been on this particular boat on this fateful night. See Ziff's, Jerrold review of The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, 2 vols.Google Scholar, by Butlin, Martin and Joll, Evelyn, in the Art Bulletin 16, 1 (March 1980): 170Google Scholar. Nevertheless, Turner, who traveled at sea all through his life, certainly knew what such an experience was like.
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49 See two letters to F.H. Fawkes, 27 December 1850 and 31 January 1851, in Gage, , Collected Correspondence, pp. 224-25, 227Google Scholar.
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