Prodigal Landscapist

According to a lady who met him in Bristol during one of his sketching trips through England, Joseph Mallord William Turner was not the sort of visitor a hostess would want to have more than once. He was "uninteresting" in manner and "slovenly" in appearance. "He is not at table polite; he would be helped, sit and lounge about, caring little for anyone but himself, or about any subject except his drawing." Turner's dedication may have been hard on those around him, but it produced some of the most delicate and influential works of art ever to come out of Britain. Manhattan's Otto Gerson Gallery this week shows 44 Turner water-colors and drawings, assembled in the U.S. and Britain by Art Critic Katharine Kuh, that clearly show how far ahead of his time Turner was.

Output: 20,000. The son of a barber in London's Maiden Lane, Turner never got enough education to make him sure of his grammar or his diction, but he was turning out competent drawings at the age of twelve which his proud father peddled to customers for one to three shillings. Two years later, in 1789, young Turner was admitted as a student to the Royal Academy at a council meeting presided over by the redoubtable Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was a small fuss-budget of a boy with unruly long curls and a large nose. He seldom spoke to anybody and confided in no one. His early watercolors are meticulously academic, but every year seemed to bring him new emancipation.

In his long lifetime he produced nearly 20,000 watercolors and drawings--mountaintops, battle scenes, romantic castles, lakes and seas. He was fascinated by weather; few experiences pleased him more than to be out in a small boat in a storm. "That's fine! That's fine!" he would cry every time a big wave tossed the boat aloft. He drew on foot, on horseback and on trains, was outraged when the conductor would not hold the train long enough for him to complete a sketch: "Damn the fellow. He has no feeling!" His work was championed by such men as Critic John Ruskin and Painter Sir Thomas Lawrence and commanded top prices. But it was also called the worst "claptrap ever painted."

Painting with Bread. What seemed like claptrap was in fact a pioneering concern with light--the same concern that the impressionists were to share almost a generation later. While other artists began even the sketchiest watercolor with a painstaking drawing, Turner worked swiftly and directly with color. He might use a sponge, a knife, a finger or a piece of bread to get the desired effect; he was perfectly willing to let form be nearly drowned in movement. Few men have ever captured so luminously the restless wave, the fleeting cloud, a gathering mist or a fading twilight.

A lifelong bachelor and semi-recluse who at his death at 76 was dodging attention by living under the name of "Mr. Booth," Turner did have his warmhearted moments. Aside from painting, his greatest ambition was to found a home for "decayed English artists (Landscape Painters only) and single men." And at one exhibition when the high colors of one of his paintings overshadowed those in two nearby Lawrence portraits, Turner tactfully smudged his own canvas with lampblack--which he washed off after the show.

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