Visiting the Turners

While in Dublin this winter I had the opportunity to see two Turner exhibitions at the National Gallery of Ireland. The larger exhibition – Turner: The Sun is God, traveling in from the Tate – was all you would expect from a major installation. Rooms of amazing paintings arranged to show a mastery of light and dark, calm and turbulence, sun, moon and weather. While the major works were major, it was fun to see Turner’s practice studies rescued no doubt from his studio floor. You know hundreds of these found their way into the trash, discarded efforts as he enhanced his craft. Yet here are the survivors now, hung in major museums around the world. Art from a master. I also loved a small vignette of a ship under sail in the moonlight. He apparently produced at least 150 of these small illustrations to be engraved for publication in works of poetry and literature. The art was both large and public, small and personal.

To my eye the true treasure was the annual showing of the Gallery’s Henry Vaughn Bequest of 31 Turner watercolors and drawings. Under the terms of the Bequest, these watercolors spend most days under wraps in a specially constructed cabinet to protect them from the elements. But each year they emerge for the month of January in a free-to-the-public viewing at Vaughn’s instruction. The setting is a small, intimate gallery where the light is carefully calibrated to be kind. The watercolors span in time from Turner’s student days to his last visits to Italy, moving from detail to abstract explosions of light. They are there, right in front of you, four-dimensional in ways no computer screen can provide. I went back more than once.