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17
in mountain landscapes, gorgeous cities (especially Venice), and the most extreme effects of
storms, fires and sunsets. Once he even had himself tied to a mast during a storm at sea so that he
could experience the full force of the wind, waves, and clouds swirling about him. Turner made
beautiful and accurate colour notes on the spot in water-colour, and painted his pictures in the
studio, in secrecy, living under an assumed name and accepting no pupils. He was the first to
abandon pale brown in favour of white, against which his brilliant colour effects could sing with
perfect clarity.
Turner often painted historical subjects, usually those of Delacroix, involving violence as well
as shipwrecks and conflagrations, in which the individual figures appear as scarcely more than spots
in a seething tide of humanity. He liked to accompany the labels with quotations from poetry, often
his own. Nonetheless, at his death a great many unfinished canvases were found that had no
identifiable subject or representation at all. Turner really enjoyed and painted the pure movement of
masses of colour - a kind of colour music, strikingly relevant to Abstract Expressionism of the
1950s. Shortly before the opening of an exhibition at the Royal Academy, the ageing Turner, would
send unfinished works, and on varnishing day paint in the details to make the pictures exhibitable to
a nineteenth-century public.
The Slave Ship, of 1840, represents an incident common in the days of slavery, when entire
human cargoes were thrown into the sea, either because of epidemics or to avoid arrest. The ship
itself, the occasional figures, and the fish feasting on the corpses in the foreground were obviously
painted at great speed only after the real work, the movement of fiery waves of red, brown, gold,
and cream, had been brought into completion.
Rain, Stream and Speed, of 1844, is one of the first paintings of a railway train, and its
Romantic idealisation of "progress" - man conquering nature by utilising its force. The train with its
light carriages moving across the high bridge is enough of a subject already, but Turner lifts it to an
almost unearthly realm in which insubstantial forces play through endless space. The veils of blue
and gold are real subjects of the picture. Turner's heightened and liberated colour sense provided a
revelation to those Impressionists (especially Monet) who took refuge in London in 1870.
Make sure you know how to pronounce the following words:
Joseph Mallord William Turner [
]; attachment
[
]; gorgeous [
]; quotation [
]; revelling [
];
revelation [
]; violence [
]; especially [
]; reveries
[
]; Monet [
]
NOTES
Rain, Stream and Speed - "Дождь, пар и скорость"
The Slave Ship - "Корабль с рабами"
TASKS
I. Read the text. Make sure you understand it. Mark the following statements true or false.
1. Turner had mystical attachment to nature.
2. Turner liked to accompany the labels with quotations from poetry.
3. Turner often painted landscapes which he constructed in the studio.
4. Turner always sent finished works to the Royal Academy.
5. Turner painted the pure movement of masses of colour - a kind of colour music, strikingly
relevant to Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s.
6. Turner's heightened and liberated colour sense provided a revelation to the Impressionists.
II. How well have you read? Can you answer the following questions?
1. What countries did Turner visit? What did he want to experience?
2. Where did Turner paint his pictures? What colour did he favour?
3. What subjects did Turner like to paint? What canvases were found after Turner's death?
4. What did Turner enjoy to paint?
5. What does the Slave Ship represent?
6. What is depicted in one of the first paintings with the Romantic idealisation of "progress"?
III. i. Give Russian equivalents of the following phrases: