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Tate St Ives’s spring show Light into Colour: Turner in the South West is the first Turner survey to focus on this period of his life, and the first exhibition in the West Country of an artist whose father was born in South Molton. But it is of far more than local interest. By reuniting works originating in these tours, it lets us follow the development of Turner’s ideas from pencil sketches made in situ through ‘colour beginnings’ made in London — using brush and wash like earth-moving equipment to shovel the landscape into tonal masses strong enough to support the later detail — to finished watercolours and published engravings. Alongside the commissioned work, we see independent pictures painted for exhibition in 1812: ‘St Mawes at the Pilchard Season’ and ‘Hulks on the Tamar’, a romantic image of decommissioned warships that prefigures ‘The Fighting Temeraire’.
What we don’t see, sadly, is Turner’s West Country masterpiece of 1815, ‘Crossing the Brook’, thought too fragile to travel. Instead we get a glimpse of a Turner rarity: a selection of ten oil sketches made on the spot. As a mature artist, Turner was normally impatient of faffing about the countryside with oil paints, and nervous about showing his personal sketches. But on his second Devon trip of 1813, local artist Ambrose Johns overcame his reluctance with a present of an oil-painting box, stocked with primed paper. Unfortunately, Johns’s priming was inadequate, leading to the loss of several sketches, but the survivors help to explain Turner’s nervousness. With their picturesque views of bridges and hayfields, they prompt comparison with more practised plein-air painters like Constable, whose spontaneous oil sketches made on the Stour in 1811 make Turner’s more deliberate efforts look like Sunday painting. But Constable was responding instinctively to a landscape he could have sketched in his sleep, whereas Turner was seeing Devon and Cornwall through the eyes of a tourist, looking for local colour that would bring his topographical prints to life: pilchard fishermen landing their catches on the quayside at St Mawes; wreckers salvaging timbers from the beach opposite St Michael’s Mount; Plymouth farm girls making hay while the sun shone, watched with cat-like eyes — he notes in his poem — by soldiers from the garrison.
Turner’s poetry was not a success. The editor to whom it was sent for subbing declared it ‘impossible for me to correct it, for in some parts I do not understand it,’ and rewrote it himself. But Turner thought like a poet, even if he couldn’t write like one. His artist’s radar picked up the poetic ironies in things: in the hulks on the Tamar retired from active duty to serve as prison ships and, since the opening of Dartmoor Prison, relieved even of that responsibility; in the young girls of Plymouth, prey to passing soldiers who would love them and leave them when the hay was in; in the storm-tossed boatload of bilious passengers desperate to make the dangerous ‘Entrance to Fowey Harbour’. And yet his oil sketches prove he could map-make with the best of them. Residents of modern Plymouth looking at ‘The Plym Estuary from Boringdon Park’ can pinpoint the precise location of Sainsbury’s on the Marsh Mills roundabout. Would Turner have found the poetry in that? Possibly not, but he might have done wonders with abandoned shopping trolleys pictured contre jour against a setting sun.
Also showing at Tate St Ives until 7 May are Ellsworth Kelly in St Ives and a glass installation by Keiko Mukaide. A smaller version of Turner in the South West tours to Plymouth Art Gallery on 19 May.
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