Turner and the Scientists, and: J.M.W. Turner: Romantic Painter of the Industrial Revolution (review)

Turner and the Scientists, by James Hamilton; pp. 144. London: Tate Gallery, 1998, £16.99, $30.00.

J. M. W. Turner: Romantic Painter of the Industrial Revolution, by William Rodner; pp. xiv + 222. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997, $45.00, £34.61.

The art of J. M. W. Turner has been thoroughly studied in modern scholarship through separate discussions of almost every aspect of his subject matter except his interest in, and response to, manifestations of the Industrial Revolution. James Hamilton's Turner and the Scientists and William Rodner's J. M. W. Turner: Romantic Painter of the Industrial Revolution fill this gap with investigations that chart the artist's response to the changing nature of modern life in his era. Each author read the other's text, but only in press and proof stages respectively. Overlaps turn out to be complementary because their readings of the man and his imagery are fundamentally opposite.

Only since the 1980s has Turner been deemed a complex individual, fully engaged in the life of his era, and conversant with a wide range of ideas. Hamilton and Rodner add to that characterization by establishing his place in nineteenth-century discourses on modern technology and the industrial age. Sheer enthusiasm and an earnest sense of discovery mark both books. Hamilton, author of a 1997 primary-source-rich biography of Turner, concentrates on the man, providing him with such a busy social life that one wonders when the artist had time to paint. Rodner reconstructs the larger era using a wide array of nineteenth-century texts while deriving his idea of Turner from an uneasy mix of twentieth-century interpretations--sometimes relying on Kenneth Clark and Norman Bryson in the same paragraph. Of the two authors, it is Rodner who takes more pleasure in the art itself, and allows for human and artistic inscrutabilities.

Turner and the Scientists is part of a series of focused studies accompanying exhibitions at the Clore Gallery. The catalogues are relatively short (70 to 150 pages), with interpretative essays aimed at a diverse audience. It is useful to note from the various Forewords and Introduction that the title of the exhibition and catalogue underwent a late change, from "Turner and Technology," or "Turner and Architecture, Science and Technology"-- which Hamilton felt would have more accurately signaled the scope of his study. One also learns that the corporate sponsor was a nuclear power provider with special interest in scientist Michael Faraday's principle of electromagnetic induction.

Hamilton's presentation of British material culture of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, including the clubs and societies that promoted scientific investigation, impresses through its abundant detail. One learns a great deal, efficiently, about the key players in the new technologies, about Turner's brief early training in architecture (in a chapter which feels too much like a research project that needed a venue), and about the older "industries" the artist recorded, from windmills to blacksmith shops to tree felling. Subsequent chapters treat meteorology, the supersession of sail power by steam, "Industry and Construction after Waterloo, 1815-51," and, finally, geology and magnetism. This broad agenda derives from Turner's canny observation of his times, though Hamilton's tally of anything even remotely "industrial" tends to atomize it. Even a subject as traditional as Turner's An Artists' Colourman's Workshop (c. 1807) is included because it contains "shadowy mechanical devices" in the obscured background (51).

Hamilton generally proceeds by explaining the significance of a particular discovery or project by a scientist or factory owner, then tracking the possible points of contact for the artist. He is prone to asserting rather than speculating that the artist's inspiration for, or thinking in, a particular work resulted from possibly having met the person, or having belonged to the same club, having had mutual friends, or perhaps having read a...