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November 22, 2013-April 21, 2014
Turner and the Sea" is a major exhibition with many strengths. It is comprehensive, displaying a good selection of Turner's sea paintings. It ranges from his very earliest portrayals of calm and storm, to his battle scenes, to his water colors and mezzotints, and even his notebooks and unfinished or preliminary works. It culminates with his glorious mastery of the light of the sun, Turner's god, in the 1830s and terminates with his final, controversial, almost abstract attempts to capture the essential feel of a stormy sea. The exhibition has a strong double historical awareness. It places Turner's paintings alongside those of earlier artists whom he admired and who influenced him, and includes work by his rivals and contemporaries, who sometimes goaded him into a fierce competitiveness. Among these other works is an unexpected but very fine Coastal Scene (1781) by Thomas Gainsborough. The curators have also realized that a proper understanding of Turner requires placing him in the context of British naval, commercial, and economic history, for this was a time of decisive British military victories at sea and of the creation of the world's first industrial nation.
Over time, smoke and steam came to characterize Turner's ships, as did the new locomotives and industries found in his landscapes. It is fitting that this exhibition is first hosted in Greenwich, the naval navel of Britain, which was once home to the Royal Naval College and the Royal Observatory and is still mapped at zero longitude, the Prime Meridian of the world and "the proper Greenwich time," gmt. That the show will move to Salem, Massachusetts to complete its run at the Peabody Essex Museum from June-September is equally appropriate. Salem was one of the centers of New England's extensive maritime trade and of the whaling industry in the nineteenth century. At the Peabody Essex Museum, Turner will join the noted American marine artists James Bard and his brother John, sons of British parents, and the collections of New England's East India Marine Society. The exhibition moves from one great town by and of the sea to another.
Undoubtedly the high points of the exhibition are Turner's three masterpieces from the 1830s: Venice: The Dogano and San Georgio Maggiore (1834),...