JMW Turner — The Yale Center for British Art — Exhibition — 2025

 

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New Haven, Conn. Conventional wisdom has it that Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was the first modern artist, his impressionistic landscapes and seascapes preceding French Impressionism by at least half a century. Not only that, but in over nearly six decades of leading the British art world, he transformed the genres of landscape and seascape. Or so the organizers of “J.M.W. Turner: Romance and Reality” at the Yale Center for British Art (through July 27) remind us. The show, containing more than 75 works—oil paintings, watercolors and prints—from the Center’s own collection, the largest Turner holdings outside Britain, comes as close as an exhibition of its concision can in backing up that claim.  

Turner was born in Covent Garden, then a bohemian district of London, to a barber-wigmaker father, and a mother from a prosperous family of shopkeepers. He started painting as a child and was sent away for proper schooling in the seaside town of Margate, in Kent. At age 14, he started taking art classes at a branch of the Royal Academy of Arts in Somerset, where he was taught to draw architectural details. Because the school relied on a “competitive environment” to foster self-instruction, he received little formal guidance. More than a decade later, Turner became a full member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London and five years after that was appointed Professor of Perspective—somewhat odd, considering how fleetingly the method shows up in his oeuvre. Turner’s education was completed, so to speak, in 1802, when he took advantage of a brief lull in the Napoleonic Wars to cross the Channel and visit the Louvre.