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Tate has the largest collection of works by J M W Turner in the world. These selections have been assembled by the Tate's Turner experts to highlight some of the key works and interesting themes which run through the collection.
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Decade 1800-1810
Turner gained full professional recognition during this decade. In 1802 he was elected to the position of Royal Academician and in 1807 was appointed Professor of Perspective for the Royal Academy schools. This decade sees the beginning of the artist's elaborate printing project, The Liber Studiorum: a series of mezzotints demonstrating six categories of subjects. Turner toured Scotland in the summer of 1801, producing a large number of energetic pencil sketches of the landscape. His journey to the continent in July 1802 allowed Turner to observe and sketch the dramatic scenery the Alps for the first time. On a visit to Paris on his return from Switzerland, Turner studied paintings by Poussin and Titian in the Louvre. These artists left a lasting impression upon Turner and their influence can be seen in his subsequent work.
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Popular Themes: Sunsets/Sunrises
A few weeks before his death in 1851, a bed-ridden and semi-conscious Turner is said to have uttered the oft-quoted phrase 'the sun is God'. Certainly, hundreds of works throughout his career were devoted to the study of sunlight and the effects of light on landscape. This selection demonstrates the artist's ability to record the dramatic and beautiful effects of sunrise and sunset in a variety of media. It is also astonishing to see how the transient effects captured by Turner were successfully translated into black and white by the engraver as works in their own right.
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Related Works
The Turner Bequest contains an amazingly diverse range of material, encompassing not only finished watercolours for exhibition, sale or engraving, but also a great deal of preparatory work. The majority of works are in pencil, made on the spot, but there are also watercolour studies and trial paintings of finished works. Turner hoarded all of these in his studio and referred to them again and again, sometimes years after they were first made. It is possible to compare finished pictures with some of the related works Turner produced during their conception and execution and to spot developments and alterations to the design.
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Turner General Highlights
This selection of works by Turner is designed to provide an introduction to the diversity and range of his output, ranging from some of his most famous exhibited and reproduced work to rarely seen items in the sketchbooks of the Turner Bequest. There are representative images from across his career, from a study from a statue as a student at the Royal Academy aged around sixteen or seventeen, to one of his most celebrated paintings, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1842 when Turner was approaching the end of his career. There is also an example of engraved work after Turner, the medium through which his images reached their widest audience during his lifetime.
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Watercolours produced for engraved series: Rogers's Italy
In 1826, Turner was commissioned to produce twenty five illustrations in vignette form for the publication Italy, a travel poem by the banker, collector and poet, Samuel Rogers (1763-1855). The book, published in 1830, with steel engravings after Turner's watercolours was a tremendous success, selling over six thousand copies by 1832 and bringing Turner much fame and wealth. All of Turner's original watercolours except for one remain in the Turner Bequest and an example of each of the engraved plates after Turner can also be found in Tate's collection. It is interesting to compare the colourful and delicate watercolours directly with the corresponding black and white engraving. The illustrations do not represent the content of Rogers's verse and are generally Turner's own impressions of the beauties of Italy.
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