Turner as Draughtsman (review)

These days, a volume focused on drawings is likely to be either a catalogue intended for the expert or the connoisseur or a coffee-table book of some attractive watercolors, neither of which is expected to carry much interpretive force. Still less might we expect a book about J. M. W. Turner and drawing to yield significant insight about the artist. Long valued as a masterful painter, Turner's perceived deficiencies in drawing have been cited since his own lifetime. And yet in Turner as Draughtsman, Andrew Wilton seeks, and largely achieves, to make an important contribution to our overall understanding of Turner's work. Indeed, Wilton argues that a complete sense of Turner's accomplishment in painting must include an awareness of the importance of drawing.

Wilton notes at the outset that the question of Turner and drawing has been a vexed one. Turner's value to modernism seemed to lie in the proto-abstract quality of some of his late, largely unfinished oils. The apparent irrelevance of drawing in these works distanced him from the discredited academicism that modernism rejected and seemed to presage the painterly, gestural work of someone like Jackson Pollock. In the last twenty years, however, a revisionist account, led by John Gage and Eric Shanes, has rejected this approach as insufficient and stressed a premodern Turner, one concerned with decidedly non-modern issues like academic practice, literary reference, and subject matter. To argue that drawing was important to Turner is to align him with these concerns, and this is the camp into which Wilton firmly places himself.

In part, therefore, this is a book that seeks to establish Turner within the artistic milieu of his lifetime, and this Wilton does quite effectively with reference to two periods in particular. The first of these, his apprenticeship and early career in the 1790s, is fairly well-studied already. But by considering the evidence with a focus on Turner's interest and engagement with drawing, Wilton brings together various bits of information that are usually presented in fragmentary form to weave a more nuanced account of the artist's interests and development in these years. His chapter on Turner as a collector of drawings, for instance, offers an important new aspect of his artistic personality.

Wilton also situates the role of Turner's sketching within his broader ambitions in these years more comprehensively and subtly than has yet been achieved. He places Turner in relation to a number of masters and contemporaries including Thomas Malton, Philippe de Loutherbourg, Canaletto, Thomas Girtin, and even the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson. Writing with the easy authority of someone who has spent many years with Turner's sketchbooks at the Tate, where the vast majority of them are housed, Wilton is able to evoke Turner's incorporation of these influences into a personal style in which drawings became a vital means of negotiating contact with the visible phenomena of the world. Wilton's descriptive language is at its evocative best in places like his discussion of Turner's incorporation of previous models during his Midland Tour of 1794, into a style that recorded both what he saw and also his growing sense of delight in the pervasive life energy of the world around him: "Drawings of Lichfield Cathedral, or a mill near Llangollen, combine indications of both architecture and foliage, where long curved lines, confidently placed on the page, alternate with shorter, scalloped ones and still smaller interlocking curves that evoke the mass of foliage by nestling inside of each other" (64). Wilton gets at the heart not only of Turner's practice, but of the developing nineteenth-century practice of landscape painting as a whole.

More unfamiliar, and contentious, is Wilton's discussion of Turner's late-1820s and early-1830s figure paintings in the context of sentimental imagery and poetry being made then for the Annuals, popular periodicals. Here, Wilton argues that what has made many of these pictures seem awkward—then and now—is Turner's failed attempt to bring...