Legacy 16- Turner/Claude

Shadows and light effects

May 28, '12 6:37 AM for everyone

As those who follow this blog from Flickr no doubt know, the latest gap in blog posting was due to a rather bigger upheaval in life than usual- my mother died on 6 May and I was in Scotland to make what turned out to be a last visit in hospital and then deal with the aftermath.   She was 92 and had not been in good health for something like six months so it wasn’t entirely a surprise- indeed I’d been marched up the hill and back down again a couple of times before Christmas as different vital systems began malfunctioning.   It still comes as a shock when it happens, though.  At least in the end she went quietly and more or less painlessly.

The real stress comes afterwards, I think.   Some of this is simply physical- clearing her house in preparation for sale (or al least going as far in that direction as is compatible with having somewhere minimally habitable when I need to go back to Scotland to deal with lawyers).   I was always aware in abstract terms that the flip side of my mother being very well organised and having papers on her money and investments in excellent order was that she was a terrible hoarder of documentation.  I hadn’t quite appreciated just how massive a hoarder she was; she didn ‘t appear to have thrown anything financial out for a decade and sometimes more (piles of material on the insurance of a car she hadn’t run for years- even hospital bills going back to the 1940’s).  Nor had she ever got rid of a holiday photograph.    Sack after sack of recycling later I was still finding stuff that needed shredding.  

Other issues are more intangible.   To be utterly honest, my mother was not always the easiest of people to get on with or even sometimes to like.   There wasn’t a lot of common ground between us on many social or political issues.   Obviously you rarely hear much about the shortcomings of the deceased in the immediate aftermath of their going but it seemed odd to hear my mother credited with qualities which even she might have raised an eyebrow at- and it made me feel a bit guilty to have such mental reservations about the hagiographic portrait being painted.  

Finally, there are some things I still haven’t quite got used to yet- like the knowledge that I’ll never again be phoned up at the most inconvenient moment imaginable (usually to be asked a question whose answer was hardly urgent) or have to structure Sunday round an obligatory hour long phone call.   I’m also coming to terms with the thought that I’ll actually have to do things off my own bat to keep in contact with the range of fairly remote cousins who are all the family I have on that side; in the past communications tended to flow via my mother and I was largely dispensed from having to think too much about family issues (or even deciding in a conscious way how far I wanted to keep up with people most of whom I don’t really know that well).

I’m over the immediate stresses, though the process of winding up the estate will no doubt be less than straightforward.   Perhaps writing this will help as well- at least I can talk about things I enjoy.   My latest artistic outing was to the rather oddly titled show at the National Gallery “Turner Inspired; In the Light of Claude”.

On one level this was a more narrowly focused version of a show which Tate Britain (which of course holds vastly more of J M W Turner’s works than the National Gallery does) put on during my dark period which sought to set Turner’s art in the context all those artists who influenced his work- as well as his artistic relationships with and reactions to the painting of his British contemporaries.   The latter aspect was perhaps the most interesting part of the Tate show- not least because it pointed up Turner’s sometimes less than scrupulous dealings with other artists and identified genres where he quietly tiptoed away from overt competition with contemporaries who, bluntly, were better at them than he was.   David Wilkie’s superior ability in painting people made sure that Turner didn’t do many “slice of ordinary life” scenes even though these were a staple of the Dutch art he admired, for instance and, rather surprisingly, his somewhat static commemoration of the Battle of Trafalgar is vastly less compelling than Philippe de Loutherbourg’s fiercely kinetic image of The Glorious First of June which it’s probably modelled on.

Nevertheless, for all that Turner was clearly subject to multiple influences in his art, there is a logic in focusing on the Claude angle.   After all, Turner himself went out of his way to underline it by leaving two of his paintings and two Claude’s in his personal possession to the National Gallery on condition that the four canvases should always be hung together.   The final gallery of the current show covers the ways in which the Gallery sought to honour (or evade) the terms of a bequest which caused all sorts of problems as it completely contradicted subsequent developments in how art galleries set about organising the display of their collections (put crudely, should the quartet go in with 17^th century French art or 19^th century British- a dilemma rendered more acute when the bulk of the British collections were transferred to what became the Tate?).    Turner being Turner, there was no doubt a considerable slice of self-promotion here; I’m sure viewers were expected to nod sagely and conclude that the pupil had far outdone his master- it is interesting that the paintings Turner put up against the Claudes had broadly comparable themes and compositions rather than reflecting his later, much looser and more experimental style.  

Not, of course, that Claude was in any literal sense Turner’s master- Claude died in 1682 and Turner was only born in 1775.  “Claude Gellee dit Le Lorrain” is how he often appears in reference books, though his surname is hardly ever used.   As his nickname suggests, he came from Lorraine (not part of the French kingdom when he was born in the early 1600’s).   Legend has it that he initially went to Rome to work in the kitchens of a cardinal but he took to painting early.   After a few years of wandering he settled in Rome and remained there for the rest of his life, part of a Francophone artistic colony which included Nicholas Poussin.  His work sold very well to visitors from north of the Alps on the nascent Grand Tour circuit and became much sought after; a fair number ended up on the walls of English stately homes.

His art was mostly landscape in focus, with a few townscapes of port cities to provide some variety.   Admittedly there are people around and the titles of the works refer to their activities but they are a bit secondary (you need to look quite hard to spot the Queen of Sheba and her entourage making their way through the imposing buildings of a grander-than-reality Mediterranean harbour above).  This is perhaps a good thing.  Claude was frankly not very good at figure painting- his people are all too often oddly out of scale with their surroundings or with themselves.   The landscapes (occasionally townscapes) which dominate them are another matter.   Whether depicting stories from the Bible, Greek mythology or classical history, he always depicts a wonderfully idealised version of the countryside around Rome which he’d have known well- one which blended out the poverty, marshes and malaria of the genuine 17^th century landscape in favour of a green, fertile, springtime world, inhabited and tamed but not totally dominated by the human presence.  A strange mix of classical ruins, classical temples restored in his imagination and post-classical buildings can be seen in the background, at the bend of a river or the foot of a mountain.    His seaports are essentially contemporary harbours but with much grander architecture in a more or less classicising mode and columned temples where churches should have been.   It’s a very appealing world, with a whiff of the fairly tale or classical myth about it.

And the light is unmistakable.   Claude was genuinely interested in shifting lighting conditions and how to capture them- he invented a system using tinted lenses which enabled him to imagine a view under differing conditions or at different times of day.   His light is elusive- the skies always seem to be clear but direct sunlight is surprisingly rare.   This isn’t always so- he painted some highly evocative sunsets, for instance, and the odd highly atmospheric dusk scene.  The majority of the time his landscapes are washed with a warm but indirect light, possibly in the very late afternoon or early morning, possibly because the sun has gone behind bank of haze.

Turner’s engagement with Claude’s art was a little unusual in that it was almost exclusively mediated through paintings.  A slightly older Turner would probably have been able to compare Claude’s works with the reality of light and shade in the Roman countryside on the artistic version of the Grand Tour.   The French Revolutionary Wars, then the war against Napoleon, put paid to that.  Tuner didn’t manage to get to Italy until the years after Waterloo, by which time his style had already moved off in its own idiosyncratic directions.   In the rare cases in which both men painted the same scene (the small town of Tivoli, for instance) it takes some effort to recognise the common aspects under the glare of Turner’s light.

Largely confined to Britain in his apprentice years, Turner arguably had rather more complex lighting effects to deal with than Claude courtesy of the British climate (more unpredictable cloud effects, sunlight-and-storm moments, stormy seas etc).   Rapid industrialisation produced smoke and fire effects to add to the range of possible lighting conditions for him to play with.  His handling of light could be remarkably aggressive and tended to become more so as he grew older.   The painting of the Roman general Regulus returning to Carthage to face his fate (he’d been liberated to talk the Romans Senate into making peace but told them to keep on fighting- and then went back to Carthage because he had promised to return) positively stabs at the eyes- appropriate enough as according to myth Regulus’ eyebrows were cut off and he was blinded by being made to look into the sun.   This was actually painted in Rome, though Turner kept working on it for a decade before showing it in 1838.  

 Often enough Turner seems to be painting into the sun, with the landscape or townscape reduced to a kind of imprecise shimmer and people little more than dark silhouettes (Turner, like Claude, wasn’t at his best with people).   Even in moments of calm there are flickerings and flarings- the improbably calm and bright moonlight which dominates one half of the painting of Newcastle coal ships loading and unloading at night is challenged by the torches burning in the other half (surely a remarkably dangerous business with wooden ships).  There is a lot more variety in Turner’s subjects; while classical mythology gets a few outings- Carthage gets several references even though that must have been a more than averagely contested area in the Napoleonic era given Napoleon’s own desire to play France as Rome to Britain as Carthage – he’s a lot more willing to paint explicitly contemporary landscapes and seascapes, whether of industrialising Britain or a Rome which hadn’t changed so very much from Claude’s day.  

By the end of his life Turner was in a paradoxical situation- a pillar of the artistic establishment whose work hardly any contemporary critics admitted to understanding, let alone liking.   Commentators tended to snipe at him.   These days he’s probably valued precisely for the qualities which caused problems in his own time; it’s easy to see him as a precursor to Impressionism and other “progressive” art movements of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.   He was probably a rather difficult man to like and certainly not burdened with false modesty.  The National Gallery show performs the useful function of showing where, in  artistic terms, he had come from and just how far he had gone.