The Tale of the Temeraire

Picture from a story in today's Wall Street Journal. HWPL owns a book Joseph Mallord William Turner, text by John Walker, which has the painting in a color plate.











In the late summer of 1838, H.M.S. Temeraire, a once-glorious remnant of the Battle of Trafalgar of 1805, was towed up the Thames to the wharf at Rotherhithe, to be broken up and sold for her fittings and oaken timbers. J.M.W. Turner's painting of the doomed ship's final passage, in which he summoned her illustrious past by rechristening her the "Fighting Temeraire," never left his possession and became part of his bequest to the nation after his death in 1851 at age 76. Enshrined in the National Gallery in London since 1856 and embodying a nostalgic nation's memory of an age when it ruled the waves, Turner's canvas remains among his best-known and best-loved works. Even today, as scholars debate the meaning of its ambiguous but deeply stirring imagery, "Fighting Temeraire" elicits a charged emotional response.

Picture gleaned from the Web.











Contrary to legend, we know that Turner did not witness the Temeraire's last journey up the Thames, and countless critics in his day and ours have enumerated the ways in which the painter plays fast and loose with the facts here. News accounts tell us, for example, that the ship had been dismasted before setting out for Rotherhithe. From a contemporary print we learn that Turner moved the smoking funnel far to the fore of his tug; and a chart of the Thames makes plain that the westward course of the voyage has the sun setting, incongruously here, in the east.

Water color - contact sport?

This story about English water colorist Tony Foster.

for certain artists – such as J.M.W. Turner, the 19th-century Englishman who, it's said, once had himself strapped to the mast of a ship in order to record a storm at sea – it becomes something resembling an extreme sport. Take Tony Foster, a contemporary English watercolorist who has specialized in wilderness scenes for the past quarter century.

I do recall the story of Admiral Farragut having himself strapped to a ship mast before the Battle of Mobile Bay, but that was a naval battle.

"I suppose the most kind of instant danger I've encountered was when I was working in the [Costa Rican] rain forest," the 62-year-old said here on a recent Sunday afternoon, after a lecture at the Autry Center for Western Art. "I'd been told to look out for white-lipped peccaries: They're wild pigs, which sounds innocuous enough, but in fact they gang together, 20 or 30 of them, and they act together; and they're quite capable of knocking you down, knocking you out, and chewing you up. People have been killed by them.

"And I was sitting in a dried-up riverbed, painting a cashew-nut tree, when these peccaries lined up on either side of the riverbank; and they obviously wanted cashew nuts. I was sitting drawing, and when they're angry, they clatter their teeth together – if you can imagine a suitcase full of false-teeth being tipped onto a tile floor, it's that kind of tremendous clattering noise. And they all started clattering at me, and lined up along the riverbank, and then charged . . . at me.
"The scientist I was working with had said, 'If you see white-lipped peccaries, run up a tree.' But there wasn't a tree I could run up. So I put my drawing-board above my head and ran back at these peccaries, shouting obscenities at them at the top of my lungs, and they sort of retreated back up the bank. And then I went and sat down again, thinking they were probably going away. But they kept coming back, and I kept charging back at them; and this sort of charge and countercharge went on for probably 20 minutes. In the end, finally, they ran back up the bank, and I ran in the opposite direction and left them to it. Afterwards, I heard from an anthropologist who'd lived many years in the jungle; and he said that the only animal he was really frightened of was the white-lipped peccary."

Mr. Foster has traveled much since then – to the West Indies, the Bolivian Andes, Greenland and Nepal, among other places. His art projects center on themes – "Rain Forests," "Deserts," "Volcanoes" – each of which takes three or four years to complete. On his journeys, he obeys the rule of wilderness back-packers – "What you carry in, you must carry out" – and his pictures are colored with paints all contained in a single box the size of his hand.
Difficult to conceive of a painter using such limited supplies.

The artist conceives of his breathtaking pictures (some, done in sections, are as large as six feet) as "watercolor diaries of journeys in wilderness," with the visual scenes bordered by written, printed or stenciled notes on events of the trip, and symbolic souvenirs (sometimes actual objects) that reference the region.

He has also painted Everest from three different angles. The account of that trip is amazing.

Giorgio Morandi

His work is interesting, but I fail to understand the point about his paintings of bottles being so sublime. This 1919 work of his impresses me much more than latter works. A slideshow of his art.

Van Gogh's Transcendent Vision

A review, a critque, an analysis of Van Gogh famous painting by Mary Tompkins Lewis, who teaches art history at Trinity College.

Painted in a small cell in an asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, Vincent Van Gogh's magisterial "Starry Night" (1889) is perhaps the most celebrated of the many paintings that chart his compressed and compelling career. The hospital of St. Paul-de-Mausole, at one time a medieval French monastery, offered the Dutch artist a refuge after the crushing disappointments of bleak months spent in nearby Arles. Van Gogh (1853-1890) had been abandoned in Arles by his fellow painter, Paul Gauguin. His ambition of founding a studio in the South of France had collapsed, and with it his dream of a utopian brotherhood of modern painters who shared his belief that art could offer an embodiment of hope amid the drudgeries of modern life.