 
Room3
Learning from Turner
The father of modern art, JMW Turner
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Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1775-1851
The Sun of Venice Going to Sea exhibited 1843
© Tate Gallery
 Audio - wav file
© 1999 Acoustiguide Ltd/
The Trustees of the Tate Gallery
All rights reserved
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By 1836 Turner's pictures had come to embody the highest principles of landscape art for Ruskin.
The two men did not actually meet, however,
until the end of the 1830s, by which point the twenty-year-old Ruskin had already become a collector of
Turner's watercolours. Between 1839 and 1851 he and his father acquired two of Turner's oil paintings and a group
of around thirty watercolours. At least eight of these were specifically commissioned by
Ruskin, which brought him into direct contact with the artist and his working methods.
Though this connection undoubtedly enriched Ruskin's understanding, it proved to be a difficult and at times
troublesome association.
The most significant work in his collection was the painting Slavers (no.47), about which he wrote
memorably in the first volume of Modern Painters. Here he praised Turner as 'the father of modern art'
because he had broken free from the conventions of earlier landscape painters. This point had lasting validity for
Ruskin, who sought to demonstrate that the expressive power of Turner's work had laid the foundations for the
development of Pre-Raphaelitism, with its scrupulous representation of nature.
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Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1775-1851
Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhoon coming on 1840
© Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Audio - wav file
© 1999 Acoustiguide Ltd/The Trustees of the Tate Gallery
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