Everyone is familiar with JMW Turner’s matchless oils and watercolours. His 1839 masterpiece, the oil painting The Fighting Temeraire, is regularly voted the greatest British artwork of all time. To mark the 250th anniversary of his birth, the Whitworth gallery in Manchester is mounting an enthralling new exhibition of his prints, equally magnetic, yet far less widely known and often overlooked. Entitled Turner: In Light and Shade, the show is quite remarkable because, for the first time in a hundred years, it displays all 71 of the artist’s published prints.
The show exhibits Turner’s extraordinary, but unjustly neglected series of landscape and seascape mezzotint prints, which were collected in the Liber Studiorum. Meaning “Book of Studies” and published in fourteen parts from 1807–19, the tome was collated when Turner was at the peak of his fame.
Peat Bog, Scotland, plate 45 from Liber Studiorum J.M.W Turner. Engraved by G. Clint.
© the Whitworth, The University of Manchester.
Giving us a new take on the artist, the exhibition teams his striking Liber prints with a host of his evocative watercolours from the Whitworth’s collection.
The prints demonstrate how Turner’s stunning deployment of colour and atmosphere in paint was reinvented in print by utilising line, tone and negative space.
Prints can often be seen as the “Cinderella” of the art world, but Turner’s use of the medium proved a game-changer. His rarely-seen, exquisite black-and-white works underline the artist’s mastery of light and shade. They show that he is perhaps the most accomplished exponent of ciaroscuro since Caravaggio. They also help explain exactly why Turner is our most revered artist and continues to inspire painters today.
Author: James Rampton
Turner: In Light and Shade
The Whitworth, The University of Manchester,
Oxford Road, Manchester, M15 6ER
Until 2 November
More information and tickets, HERE.
Lead image: Storm in the Pass of St. Gotthard, Switzerland, 1845 J.M.W Turner © the Whitworth, The University of Manchester.
Other unmissable art shows you may like: Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo; The Face Magazine: Culture Shift; Stephen Cox: Myth, and David Hockney 25.
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