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Victorian Studies 45.2 (2003) 358-360



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The Oxford Companion to J. M. W. Turner, edited by Evelyn Joll, Martin Butlin, and Luke Herrmann; pp. xxvi + 420. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, £60.00, $95.00.

J. M. W. Turner made himself the greatest of English painters by exercising his genius in a long and prodigiously productive life. Starting about 1784, at the age of nine, he created by the time of his death in 1851 more than 500 paintings, more than 1,500 watercolors, and nearly 19,000 sketches. Turner's industry has in turn begotten a Turner industry, especially in our own time; as the late Michael Kitson notes in the present volume, "the remarkable spate of books, articles, and exhibition catalogues on Turner produced in the last third of the 20th century can be matched for few other artists before the French Impressionists" (246).

As a guide to this formidable body of scholarship and to the life and art of Turner himself, this volume is more than welcome, especially for the range of expertise displayed by its three distinguished editors and fifty-three contributors. In entries ranging in length from a brief paragraph to a dozen closely printed columns, they treat nearly every topic imaginable that can be linked to Turner. They consider many of his oils and watercolors as well as his sketches; they examine his travels, friends, assistants, fellow artists, stylistic models, techniques, debts to literature, family members, mistresses, patrons, and contemporary collectors; they document his influence on later artists, the contemporary reception of his work, significant events and developments in his time (such as photography), major public exhibitions of his work over the past fifty years, and notable publications on Turner from early monographs to the most recent biographies by Anthony Bailey and James Hamilton (both published in 1997). Supplementing these wide-ranging entries are thirty- two excellent color reproductions of Turner's oils; a select bibliography of catalogues, biographical studies, and monographs; and a synoptic chronology that aligns the events of Turner's life with the events of his time—in the arts and in the world at large.

This volume anatomizes Turner without atomizing him. While briefly scrutinizing minor matters such as Turner's pornographic sketches and the relevance of Ann [End Page 358] Dart, who knew Turner briefly in the 1790s and told John Ruskin a few things about him, the editors and their contributors also bravely tackle large and unwieldy topics such as the importance of subject matter in Turner's work, his lectures on perspective at the Royal Academy, his views on politics and society, his stylistic development, and the rich history of Turner scholarship. Some of the longer entries—such as Luke Herrmann's on Venice, Martin Butlin's on varnishing days at the Royal Academy, and Cecilia Powell's on travel— are highly informative essays that should prove indispensable to anyone starting work on these topics.

In many ways, then, this volume seems the ideal companion for anyone setting out to explore the world and the work of Turner as well as an invaluable reference for anyone already laboring in the vineyard of Turner studies. Nevertheless, the selection and arrangement of materials raises some questions. Take for instance the absence of any entry devoted to color, or even a heading with that term followed by cross-references. In spite of the editors' commendable determination to treat large-scale topics such as Turner's views on perspective and his stylistic development, anyone seeking information about Turner's conception of color and his management of pigment will have to make do with a brief entry on "Pigments in Oil Paintings and Watercolours" and will have to be already familiar with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Theory of Color (1810), for it is only in John Gage's entry on Goethe that one finds any discussion of how Turner adopted and adapted Goethe's theory—along with a few comments on Turner's own thoughts about color and light. But Gage says nothing of Turner's...

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