Turner on tour: it’s like lads on tour but with considerably more monumental landscape painting than the average trip to Magaluf.
The tour of the title is twofold: firstly, the paintings in this small free exhibition have been loaned to the National Gallery by the Frick collection in New York, returning home to London for the first time in over 100 years. Secondly, they’re basically JMW’s holiday snaps, two gorgeous visions of ports in Dieppe and Cologne.
They’re massive, ludicrously imposing paintings. Turner saw ports as bustling sites of history and trade, heaving with centuries-old activity, ancient architecture, modern hustlers and a constant flow of goods and ideas.
Dieppe is busy, a hectic maelstrom of masts peeking out of polluted waters. The city closes the harbour in, surrounding it with infinite columns and windows and roofs, all shimmering around the bustle.
It's Turner trying to wedge himself into the canon of great European painters with bolshy arrogance, big gestures, sweeping scale
Just one boat dominates Cologne, sat on a sandy foreshore, packed with people. A church spire looms behind, in the distance some hills roll. It’s calmer, more sedate than the other work.
These are aggressively showy paintings. They’re Turner trying to wedge himself into the canon of great European painters with bolshy arrogance, big gestures, sweeping scale.
They don’t really work up close: the perspective gets twisted when you’re too near, everything gets elongated and morphed. They’re meant to be seen from far away, taken as a whole to pull you in and tug at your eyes.
That’s also why the smaller details don’t really matter, why the faces are smudged, the bodies all blurred together. Everything is in service of the whole, you’re not meant to sweat the small stuff, you’re meant to lose yourself in the vista, stand back and be overawed.
But there’s one thing that dominates both paintings: a huge, hulking, throbbing, pulsating yellow sun. It’s slightly off-centre in Dieppe, tucked off to the right in Cologne, but its thick fog of light envelops everything in these worlds. It’s glowing, brilliant, and it comes right out at you, blinding the viewer.
That’s the point. Everything here is designed to dazzle you, overwhelm you, dwarf you, and maybe even – if you stare long enough – give you sunburn.
