UK Edition
Review
Turner in January: 200-year-old watercolours that seem shockingly modern
Brought out just once a year, but now in a bright new home, these works by the great Romantic artist have never looked better
“All at one time free of charge and in the month of January and no longer”. Those were the terms of the Victorian collector Henry Vaughan, when he bequeathed a selection of 38 Turner watercolours to the Scottish National Gallery in 1900. The delicate paintings have been shown in the depths of the Edinburgh winter – when natural light which could damage them is at its lowest – since 1901, except when made impossible by war or pandemic.
The Romantic painter JWM Turner is now renowned for his dramatic oil paintings, many of which hang in the Turner Collection at Tate Britain or in the National Gallery in London. Landscapes lit up by all-powerful yellow light; dramatic scenes of awful shipwrecks and violent seas; and, most famously, the poignant The Fighting Temeraire: a large canvas that shows one of the warships that fought in the Battle of Trafalgar being towed away by a steam tug less than half its size.
But the works in Turner in January are not just scaled-down versions of these more famous landscapes. As a result of having been so fastidiously preserved since their creation, the paintings provide a wonderfully intimate view of Turner’s life and practice.
Watercolours fade over time when exposed to light, an effect that often leaves them looking like drab washes of dishwater when hung on crowded gallery walls. But this collection of paintings has escaped this fate. When compared with the grey city outside, they seem almost luminous. Vaughan’s selection is comprehensive: moody views of Venice – painted in one of Turner’s many visits to the Continent – sit alongside picturesque, ruined castles, and scenes of English fishing life.
In many of the works, there are signs of Turner’s practice. Watercolour is a famously inflexible medium: once a wash of paint has been added, there is no possibility of removing it. But Turner made this difficulty his own. He scratched off the top layer of the paper with a needle or his thumb nail to reach the bright white beneath – an effect that makes the lightning in his painting of The Piazzetta, Venice wonderfully shocking, or the highlights on a painting of an arched bridge in Heidelberg all the more dazzling.
On another painting, Venice from the Lagoon, Turner’s fingerprint is still visible from where he dabbed the paint to create a trail of black smoke. And in some of the earliest included works – scenes of boats and landscapes in Sussex that Turner painted when he was just 20 – there are even signs of his collaboration with another young artist: the faint pencil marks are thought to have been made by etcher and painter Thomas Girtin.
These works’ annual surfacing is a staple of the art calendar, but, this year, the exhibition has changed. It is the first time they have been shown in the large, bright space of the Royal Scottish Academy, rather than their former home in a small, red-walled room in the Scottish National Gallery. And, there is another work in their midst. The theatrical storm scene of Bell Rock Lighthouse (painted using both watercolour and its more opaque cousin, bodycolour) was not part of the bequest, but its inclusion reveals the link between these paintings and the rest of Turner’s work. These paintings may date from a period of Victorian philanthropy and the early days of English landscape painting. But, in their new home, they seem shockingly modern.
From Jan 1-31. Details: 0131 624 6200; enquiries@nationalgalleries.org