Custom term paper on Art of romanticism: ideas of Henry Fuseli and William Turner

The later works by Turner are marked with the usage of unusually rich colour scale (“The ‘Fighting Temeraire’ Tugged to Her Last Birth to be Broken Up”, 1838), which is also peculiar for the darkest paintings of this period, such as “The Evening Star” (1840) and “Burial at Sea” (1842). Since the mid 1840’s, William Turner was experiencing a creative crisis, reflected in the loss of dramatic tension and color contrasts. Using watercolor, he wrote the Venetian landscapes and quiet Swiss towns in which the difference of tone intensity disappears, and blurry shapes and disharmonizing colors emerge. Turner’s landscapes start resembling elusive mirages (“Rain, Steam, and Speed”, 1844) (Wilton 106-110).
In the last twenty years of his life, Turner looks at nature merely as at a pretext for playing colorful symphonies, creates extraordinary and fantastic images, in which the shapes of objects are slightly designated by bounds of shiny, strong or delicate, nuances adjusted in the enchanting harmony; simultaneously Turner’s painting get extremely bold and pasty, sometimes too sketchy and ragged (“Approach to Venice” 1843, “The Fighting Temeraire” 1838). Figures at Turner’s paintings, even at those for which he took historical plots, are very mediocre, but they appear appropriately and are not rushing into the eyes, contributing to the overall effect of the composition (Wilton 131-137).
Since his first works, Turner starts developing the theme of conflict between man and destructive forces of nature, which further occurs throughout the entire career of the artist. In Turner’s romanticism understanding, angry states of nature such as storms, hurricanes and related disasters could serve the best background for historical events, while the drama of nature remained Turner’s main hero (Brown 123-32).
Turner was trying to express in his paintings the sublime romantic feeling of merging with nature. Hence, he inclined to the contrast enhancement of thunderstorm clouds, dark mountains on their sides, shining valley in the center, in which he could drop one end of a colorful rainbow. Moreover, a rainbow could be reflected in the water, which never happens in reality, because it does not take a particular place in space. But Turner never hesitated to accept absurdity, if he needed it in the painting. The artist was very passionate about demonstrating the aerial perspective and about search for delicate gradations of light transitions. custom term paper
Turner had a habit to accompany the titles of his paintings in the exhibition catalogs with the quotations from his favorite poets, Thomson, Milton, or his own poetry (Wilton 95). The majority of these quotes were related to either the light or some other atmospheric phenomena. Joseph Mallord Turner’s contemporaries called him a painter of golden visions, wonderful and beautiful, though possessing no substance. He planned to depict the sun or sunlight with the righteousness, which had not been presented in earlier art works, and tried achieve the demonstration of the sun in all its effulgence. The paintings of Turner intricately combined virtuoso technique and tongue-tied, isolation and desire to serve people, practical mind and philanthropy, veneration of the picturesque traditions of the past and tireless search for some unique language of Romanticism (Brown 157-64).
Turner’s famous illusions rise to heights of allegory, when at the dawn of the Victorian era Turner for the first time takes on subjects related to the dramatic moment of the invasion of the steam engine in the idyllic world of sails and crews. And while in the famous canvas “Rain, steam and speed” it is still possible to distinguish the features of the locomotive, tearing the space, the composition of the painting “Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead” turns into a solid extravaganza of light and color, which more and more resembles abstract paintings of the 20th century.
Technological progress seemed poetic and exciting to William Turner, and the actions of people seemed disgusting and cruel. Just like Fuseli, Turner was much ahead of his time in his perception of the world, and so few contemporaries understood his art. Nowadays, this artist is recognized as one of the most prominent representatives of the English school of painting. Everything created by Turner was very diverse and reflected his bold search and discoveries; therefore, it is fair to mark that Turner worked for future generations. The artist walked a difficult path of complex searches and rose to the understanding of reality as the unity of color and light in their imperceptible movement, devoid of material, tangible form.

Works Cited:

Brown, David Blayney. Romanticism (Art and Ideas). Phaidon Press, 2001. Print.
Myrone, Martin. Henry Fuseli. Princeton University Press, 2001. Print.
Wilton, Andrew. Turner in His Time. Thames & Hudson, 2007. Print.