Turner unbound: Yale revisits the radical painter's journey

Boston Globe

05-06-2025

I say this as a certifiable Turner freak, a sucker for every painterly gnash and flourish. 'Romance and Reality' delivers the goods upfront: At the entry hangs 'Staffa, Fingal's Cave,' from 1832, a dark symphony of painterly menace. The lurch of an ashen sea collides with bleached light from above, casting sandy cliffs in a meaty fleshtone through hoary mist; a frigate steams into coal-black fog towards a smouldering sun sunk into the horizon as it 'burst(s) through the raincloud,
angry
,' in Turner's own words. Ah.
J.M.W. Turner, "Harlech Castle, from Tygwyn Ferry by Summer's Evening Twilight," 1799. (Yale Center for British Art)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Critics, then and now, haven't bothered to suppress an eyeroll at Turner's penchant for the overwrought, and I'll admit to the occasional cringe of my own. Such is Turner, a high-order dramatist ever on the edge of schmaltz. But for me, his painterly might overpowers any misgivings, and any cringe is one of affection. Frank in his fury, he's the least British-seeming of Brits, an emotional powderkeg; that he's most-loved of all British artists
ever
might tell you something, too.
Advertisement
The mature Turner found an outlet for his fury in the righteous cause of abolition. One of the most powerfully harrowing paintings of all time, 'Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On),' 1840, now hangs at the MFA as part of its exhibition
J.M.W. Turner, "On the Washburn," ca. 1815. (Yale Center for British Art)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
A barber's son, born in an upstairs flat on Covent Garden when it was a seething market alive with the stink of livestock, Turner felt the roiling chaos of his time like few of his artistic peers, most of whom had the fine education and genteel upbringing of the upper class. A brash everyman with the gift of paint, Turner's work can feel like the furious explosion of the indignation of an entire social class ground down by indifferent elite rule – and at the MFA, by design, it surely did.
Advertisement
Yale, meanwhile, provides less a point of view than a Turner 101, a sample platter arranged by era and theme. The Center for British Art has more — and more significant — Turners in its collection than any other outside the United Kingdom. That saidEven so, I approached it with a little pre-emptory disappointment; I like my Turner unrestrained – raging fire-and-brimstone against the ills of the world, flexing his painterly muscle Stallone-like.
'Romance and Reality' is laid out almost primly, in chronological order, leading off with a hesitant young artist following the romantic realist tradition in his depictions of the British countryside.
Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne: Morning, ca. 1845, oil on canvas. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
By mistake, I went the wrong way – the exhibition is a loop, entry and exit at the same point – and found much satisfaction in traveling the Turner timeline backwards, frontloading the experimental élan of his later years and meandering Benjamin Button-like back to his formative phase.
To truly understand Turner – his unceasing yearning to move ever forward, to never stand pat – there's something deeply inspiring in working backwards from his dying breaths. Turning right at 'Staffa, Fingal's Cave,' I was in the exhilarating embrace of a section titled 'Tragic Vision' – cue the mournful string section of a movie soundtrack – and a suite of Turners so softly indistinct as to almost be breath hanging on winter air.
Made in the final decade of his life, Turner was reaching ever further beyond the known, unmoored from this mortal plane and transported by the end of his brush. 'Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne: Morning,' 1845, made a half-dozen years before his death, feels like Turner becalmed: its glow beatific, its cliffs inchoate and dreamy through a misty gloaming. 'Squally Weather,' a small piece painted sometime between 1840 and 1845, knots shadow and light into a dense bundle, a storm of emotional tumult.
Advertisement
J.M.W. Turner, "Dort, or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed," 1818. (Yale Center for British Art).
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Turner's life may straddle the 18th and 19th centurycq, but he's often cited as the first Modern painter, though he died decades before the term was born. His loose, furious brushwork and wild sense of color inspired Impressionists like Monet and Pissaro, Modernism's vanguard. And in the hazy depths of his emotional landscapes, it's no reach to see the roots of Abstract Expressionism, a fury of feeling devised by a cohort of American painters after World War II.
Indeed, thousands of watercolors discovered in his overstuffed home after his death – so disordered, one critic wrote, 'it might have been the scene of a murder' –
feel, in hindsight, like clear lineage:
stacks of papers stained and smeared with explosive color appear almost to be abstract experiments.
Advertisement
J.M.W. Turner, "Mer de Glace, in the Valley of Chamoix," 1803. (Yale Center for British Art)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Tracking backwards through Turner's life feels like being witness to a parallel version of art history, of an artist ever straining against convention even as he mastered it. 'Dort, or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed' (he did love his titles), from 1818, might be a standard maritime scene of its day -- stiff, traditional crisply-painted, with particular attention to the billow and shade of the tallship's sails – but for the teem of humanity Turner loads into it, a scene overflowing with labor and action.
Turner's gifts were so abundant that he could do anything; instead, he did
everything
, and supremely well. The Yale show will give you that; a selection of his early watercolor landscapes are confounding in their precision, a young Turner bending the most capricious of media with uncanny ease. Subtly, it includes its counterpoints; 'Mer de Glace, in the Valley of Chamoix,' 1803, a mountain scene painted when he was just 28, lurches leftward as though blown by the wind with such violent verve your own feet wobble.
J.M.W. Turner, "The Evening Gun," ca 1825. (Yale Center for British Art)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
And in easy eyeshot of 'Dort' is a wall of Turner's prints, the bulk of them in ashen and coal-black tones. The range of mastery confounds, from near-photographic clarity to the fog of the barely recognizable: The gothic arches of Kirstall Abbey, its every stone seam in high relief, astounds; nearby, the cascading shadow of 'Catania, Sicily,' subsumed in its black fog, feels almost Rothko-esque. No Turner is without its own provocation and mystery. Yale might be painting by numbers, but Turner never could.
Advertisement
Murray Whyte can be reached at