Turner – The Sun is God

The youngest artist ever elected to the Royal Academy, recognized as the greatest landscape painter of the Romantic period for his mastery of light, color and atmosphere, Turner, born in 1775 in London, signed his first drawings at the age of 12, mostly copies after other artists.

Admitted to the Royal Academy in 1789, he first took classes in antique painting and then in life drawing until 1793. That same year, he received a prize from the Royal Society of Arts for drawing and landscape.

He traveled in Great Britain, France and Switzerland. His numerous trips contributed greatly to his inspiration. Turner quickly met with success, especially thanks to watercolor, the first technique in which he expressed himself and which allowed him to affirm in an instant the trace of a sunbeam or a storm.

His virtuosity was crowned in 1802 by his election as a full member of the Royal Academy. London and the Thames were recurrent themes, but from his countless travels in Great Britain, Europe and the Alps, he produced a colorful body of work, whose chromatic exuberance blends with the alchemy of light.

This precursor of romantic landscape and impressionism, with a secret life, died in 1851 and, according to his wishes, was buried in the crypt of Saint Paul's Cathedral.

The Foundation's walls are now home to Turner's masterpieces from the Tate for a second time. In 1999, David Blayney Brown organized a remarkable exhibition: Turner and the Alps, which was a great success. Twenty-four years later, he is once again curating this exhibition, proposing several themes illustrated by the oils, watercolors and gouaches of this illustrious artist, whose work oscillates between romanticism and impressionism. Among all these techniques, the selection demonstrates the extent to which watercolor plays a crucial role in capturing the intensity of the forces of nature with unparalleled expressiveness.

Memory, imagination and synthesis. Turner's travels in Britain and Europe proved to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration for his landscape paintings. The sketches he made in the open air were a source of inspiration for his drawings and watercolors made in the studio. He embellished them with mythological or historical stories to create spectacular landscapes where imagination competes with memory. Turner never visited Greece, yet some of his paintings accurately reflect its fantastic atmosphere, its bright skies and its solar gods. In this first theme, we can admire Turner's watercolor and gouache on paper illustrating : The Devil's Bridge and the Schöllenen Gorge, graphite, watercolor and gouache based on slors studies of Turner's visit to Switzerland. He hears about this vertiginous gorge disarming the one who comes up to it.


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.