Gippsland exhibition explores Joseph Turner's impact on Australian landscape art

Australia Broadcast Center

16-06-2025

A major exhibition showcasing the work of one of Britain's greatest landscape artists, Joseph M.W Turner, is being touted as the first of its kind in Australia.
The Turner & Australia exhibition at the Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale features 11 original works by the master of landscape and light, who profoundly influenced impressionist technique and abstract modern art.
The works will be exhibited alongside 300 comparable paintings by Australian landscape artists such as John Glover, Eugene Von Gerard, Fredrick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts.
Gallery director Simon Gregg said the exhibition aimed to highlight Turner's profound impact on Australian art.
"It's really about capturing some of that mysterious spirit of what Turner was doing, his approach to depicting the natural environment, his vision that he had two centuries ago and re-animating it in an Australian context," Mr Gregg said.
Mr Gregg said Turner, who died in 1851, was a "god-like figure in Australian art".
"There is an intense drama — the light and the tone that he brings into his work — and if you go backwards through time, all roads lead to Turner," Mr Gregg said.
Born to a working class family in London in 1775, Joseph Mallard William Turner was a talented child prodigy with an accurate eye for detail.
At the age of 14 he became an apprentice draftsman to an architect, before entering the prestigious Royal Academy Schools a year later.
Turner would travel through the British countryside, sketching landscape features such as valleys, mountains and castles from different angles as the light changed throughout the day.
"He'd later pick out one or two sketches and actually fill them in with the watercolours, with the memory fresh in his mind of what colours he had seen," Mr Gregg said.
On return to his London studio, he would pull together the best elements of his sketches, bringing the sky of one image and the geographical features of others into hybrid compositions.
By the mid-1790s, Turner began painting with oil.
He studied the stormy Dutch marine paintings of the 17th century and the serene landscapes of French artists Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain.
During his travels through Wales and Europe, Turner was drawn to extreme weather events and apocalyptic scenarios.
Venturing into the jagged Swiss alpine region, he was one of the first artists to visually embody philosopher Edmund Burke's concept of 'the sublime'.
Turner's depictions of swirling mists, sinister fogs, tumultuous seas and haze-veiled sunlight would eventually see him paint less distinctive geographical forms, instead capturing them dissolved, blurred and blown out by light.
As a literary concept of the 18th century, the sublime referred to things that were beyond human comprehension; the meeting point of beauty and terror in the natural world, and the insignificance of man amid the divine, exhilarating and mysterious forces of nature.
"Over the course of time he became more interested in depicting something that was less tangible, more of an experience of being in pure atmosphere," Mr Gregg said.
"Claude Monet, the French impressionist, absolutely idolised Turner because Turner was painting with pure light and colour.
"You could credit Turner as the first impressionist painter; he was in many ways the first pure abstract painter as well."
With the arrival of the industrial revolution, Turner turned his hand to documenting the burgeoning industrialised world.
While most artists were still painting pretty views of the English countryside, Turner was painting scenes of modern industry.
"He was also credited as the first artist to show pollution, particularly in London," Mr Gregg said.
"In 1828 he did this painting of the [River] Thames, but it's all muddy and brown and grey; that's because he was showing this thick industrial fog that was rolling over the city."
By the 1830s and 40s, art critics started to turn against Turner.
His violent application of paint and hazy pastel plumes would drown out his subjects to the point of being indistinguishable.
It was an illusion dismissed by one critic as "soap suds and white wash".
"No-one was painting anything like this," Mr Gregg said.
"It wasn't really until 50 or 100 years later that people really understood what Turner has been trying to do."
As one of the pioneers of painting "landscape for landscape's sake", and depicting landscape as a living, moving character with emotion and feeling, Mr Gregg said he often wondered how Turner might have responded to the savage extremes of the "beautiful and terrifying" Australian landscape.
"We're an island continent with oceans, beaches, mountains, deserts. We have intense light, we have incredible storms, all these things that Turner was actually seeking out," Mr Gregg said.
"So you have to wonder what he might have done if he had ever come to Australia."
Turner & Australia is showing at the Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale until August 24, 2025.