Art Styles & Periods, Artists, Architects & Photographers - Biography, European Art

Turner

Name: Turner
Author: James Hamilton
ISBN: 9780812967913

by James Hamilton

Available on Bookshop Write a review

Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.

Overview

Over the course of sixty years, Turner traveled thousands of miles to seek out the landscapes of England and Europe. He was drawn overwhelmingly to coasts, to the electrifying rub of the land with the sea, and he regularly observed their union from the cliff, the beach, the pier, or from a small boat. Fueled by his prodigious talent, Turner revealed to himself and others the personality of the British and European landscapes and the moods of the surrounding seas. He kept no diary, but his many sketchbooks are intensely autobiographical, giving clues to his techniques, his itineraries, his income and expenditures, and his struggle to master the theories of perspective.

In Turner, James Hamilton takes advantage of new material discovered since the 1975 bicentennial celebration of the artist’s birth, paying particular attention to the diary of sketches with which Turner narrated his life. Hamilton’s textured portrait is fully complemented by a sixteen-page illustrations insert, including many color reproductions of Turner’s most famous landscape paintings. Seamlessly blending vibrant biography with astute art criticism, Hamilton writes with energy, style, and erudition to address the contradictions of this great artist.

Synopsis

J.M.W. Turner was a painter whose treatment of light put him squarely in the pantheon of the world’s preeminent artists, but his character was a tangle of fascinating contradictions. While he could be coarse and rude, manipulative, ill-mannered, and inarticulate, he was also generous, questioning, and humane, and he displayed through his work a hitherto unrecognized optimism about the course of human progress. With two illegitimate daughters and several mistresses whom Turner made a career of not including in his public life, the painter was also known for his entrepreneurial cunning, demanding and receiving the highest prices for his work.

Over the course of sixty years, Turner traveled thousands of miles to seek out the landscapes of England and Europe. He was drawn overwhelmingly to coasts, to the electrifying rub of the land with the sea, and he regularly observed their union from the cliff, the beach, the pier, or from a small boat. Fueled by his prodigious talent, Turner revealed to himself and others the personality of the British and European landscapes and the moods of the surrounding seas. He kept no diary, but his many sketchbooks are intensely autobiographical, giving clues to his techniques, his itineraries, his income and expenditures, and his struggle to master the theories of perspective.

In Turner, James Hamilton takes advantage of new material discovered since the 1975 bicentennial celebration of the artist’s birth, paying particular attention to the diary of sketches with which Turner narrated his life. Hamilton’s textured portrait is fully complemented by a sixteen-page illustrations insert, including many color reproductions ofTurner’s most famous landscape paintings. Seamlessly blending vibrant biography with astute art criticism, Hamilton writes with energy, style, and erudition to address the contradictions of this great artist.

From the Hardcover edition.

The Washington Post

Why J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) appeals to such a sizable but discerning audience is not a topic that particularly interests James Hamilton, a respected British curator and author of this 1997 biography of the artist, which has now been published in the United States. He isn't given to wide-ranging speculations about layers of meaning, shifts in taste or many other extra-pictorial issues. In this otherwise very satisfying and ably written book, he works like a realist portrait painter himself, more Gainsborough than Manet -- detailed, judicious and confidently grounded in the period. If we aren't offered any new insights about cultural history or aesthetic experience, we are given a credible, useful image of a life, a career and a body of work. — John Loughery

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

The Los Angeles Times

As described by James Hamilton's richly detailed biography, Turner's life combined the canny entrepreneurial spirit of any businessperson promoting a brand within a cut-throat market and a profound engagement with the sheer physical labor of his craft. With this in mind, Hamilton's opening quotation from Turner, "The only secret I have got is damned hard work," is in some ways the ultimate refinement of his subject's story — like Warhol's pronouncement that all there is to know about him can be found on the surface of his paintings. — Michael Bracewell

The New Yorker

Showered with honors from the time he was in his teens, J. M. W. Turner had few setbacks in his long career as England's finest Romantic landscape painter. But the secret of his success, Hamilton suggests in this lively biography, had almost as much to do with an outsized gift for self-promotion as with artistic talent. From cocksure student to arrogant academician, Turner emerges as a greedy, status-obsessed egotist whose revolutionary treatment of light and color was offset by a good deal of bad poetry, not to mention bad manners. If the artist's self-avowed ambition was to surpass Claude Lorraine, he showed equal aptitude for dealing real estate, playing off patrons, and neglecting his family -- his mentally disturbed mother died forgotten in an asylum. Still, for Hamilton no personal flaw can mar a world-class talent, and Turner escapes with his legacy intact, remaining, as he described himself, "the great lion of the day."

The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Employing newly available sketchbooks, Hamilton (Turner and the Scientists) contends that painter J.W.M. Turner (1775-1851) was a prodigy who first exhibited his work in his father's barber shop and owed his fame to innate opportunism as much as to matchless talent. The sketchbooks reveal a young man anxiously seeking institutional favor, painstakingly preparing his 1811 lectures on perspective in the hopes of defeating his famous inarticulacy. They trace Turner's charge through the English countryside, where he scaled improbable heights and expertly sketched scenes (many later completed from memory). Hamilton attributes this frenetic activity to Turner's obsession with the preciousness of both money and time, and suggests that the latter concern eventually prevailed. Once at home in the Royal Academy and convinced of his genius, Turner could afford to flout public opinion and devote himself to quixotic pursuit of the colors and tones churned by "the engine of the air." One critic, fearing Turner's influence on younger artists, dubbed him "over-Turner," while scientists esteemed his Prospero-like light effects. Somewhat dismayed by the discomfiting details of his subject's life-Turner apparently disregarded his children, enjoyed pornography and consigned his mother to an insane asylum until her death-Hamilton downplays them. His affectionate, dignified study is designed for scholars who will relish Turner's travel itineraries, housing plans and overwrought poems-trivia that serve less to illuminate Turner's work than to selectively humanize his myth. Three 8-page color photo inseres not seen by PW. (On sale June 3) Forecast: Published in the U.K. in 1997, this title's release is pegged to a Turner exhibit this summer in Williamstown, Mass., but the book's U.S. appearance now may have more to do with setting up Hamilton's forthcoming Random title, a biography of scientist Michael Farraday. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

This first U.S. edition of a work published in 1997 in the U.K. is a fine example of biography and art history. Turner scholar Hamilton (Turner and the Scientists) has put to good use newly discovered material, which helps to dispel some myths and reveal more about the private life the artist kept hidden from his public. The origins and subtexts of many of Turner's most important paintings are examined with a fresh insight, and although the suppositions may be the author's own, they do serve as a stimulus to further inquiry. A man of many faults, often rude and ill tempered, shrewd and manipulative, Turner was also an enormously hard worker. This biography is filled with details of private life, public persona, and artistic images, presented in an elegant and fine scholarly style. Anthony Bailey's Standing in the Sun is also an excellent and perhaps a fuller treatment of Turner's life, but this new biography is a useful contribution to the extensive literature on Turner and should be added to all art and academic library collections, as well as to large public collections.-Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A splendid, masterful portrait of the master painter. England's greatest landscape artist, J.M.W. Turner, born in 1775 into humble but comfortable circumstances, had a talent for drawing that revealed itself early. Owing to his proud barber father's gregariousness, he was made known to and subsidized by the prosperous and well-connected. Admitted to the Royal Academy at the astonishing age of 14, Turner blossomed and was exhibiting within a year. He emerged from that institution a fully developed artist. Never shy of self-promotion, Turner vigorously cultivated the aristocracy and well-to-do, thus establishing a reliable base of patrons and influential friends. While Turner had a high opinion of himself, it wasn’t unearned. He was an extraordinarily gifted artist, especially in the use of color and light, unequaled to this day. In this admiring account, Hamilton (Curator/University of Birmingham) posits that the artist, despite his flaws, was that rarest of creatures: a truly gifted but overall decent man, generous to younger artists and loyal to his friends as well his beloved Royal Academy. Hamilton does a fine job assembling the large cast of characters, places, and details of this long life. If all these particulars at times begin to feel drawn out or tedious, the purpose eventually becomes clear as Hamilton relates them to specific paintings. (He also quotes extensively, perhaps too much so, from Turner’s own rather pedestrian verse, making attempts to link it to specific paintings, while noting that when it came to poetry, Turner did not know "when—indeed, how—to stop.") The thoroughness of research and facility in its application here are gratifying. The luciddescriptions of Turner's paintings are extensive but easily accessible. Belongs in every art lover's library. (3 color photo inserts, not seen)