Turner and Constable at the Tate Britain

I like Turner as a painter who kept developing.

Trained and employed as an architectural draftsman, he was skilled in realistic detail. But he never ceased to push further, loosening detail into sweeping abstract swirls, shattering light into its colors – many decades before Impressionism and Pointillism.

The huge canvases are the ones readily associated with Turner, classical and Biblical and mountainous and tempestuous scenes such as “Hannibal Crossing the Alps,” vast smears of dark paint almost formulaically expressing cloud masses and torrential rain and plunging mountainsides, light-wells made by the moon or a lake, sharp contrast against them of dark details such as human figures or castle tower or pillar-like tree.

But, in a way, this small early study, a selective glimpse of Salisbury cathedral,   encapsulates the development.

It’s skillful as a drawing. Not easy to get all those pinnacles and buttresses in place.

And the dark foreground window, used as a frame, brings out the sunlight on the distant surfaces by contrasting with it.

But why is the tracery of the window arch broken?

It was intended, I think, to give us a twinge of anxiety that more may fall away. A foretaste of other and larger-scale ways of inspiring stark emotion.

This is the picture in its frame. I have yet to be convinced, as Turner apparently was, that the traditional gilt frame well serves the picture it grips.

__________

This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.