Turner: Glazing over Impasto

Recently I made the 3-4 hour car trip from Sydney to Canberra to see the Turner from the Tate exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia.

I had seen many of the works years ago at the Tate Gallery in London (which has the best collection of his much dispersed work), but an opportunity to see them in the flesh again was too good to pass up.

J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) was one of Britain’s most original and inventive artists, a key figure of Romanticism, who influenced the Impressionists and even the Abstract Expressionists.

The exhibition includes several immense landscapes full of his ethereal brushstrokes and fascinating detail. These seem to glow as with an inner light, and are magnificently framed in monumental gilded mouldings. There are also many gem-like little watercolours to see.

A highlight of his later career is Venice, the Bridge of Sighs, 1840 (top and detail) in which he uses the oil technique of glazing over impasto. This technique gives the illusion of fine detail, without the need for laborious brushwork. 

The toxicity of real Lead White paint meant that it has been replaced by other pigments such as Titanium White. It's not easy to obtain these days, but some manufacturers of professional grade oil paints still make it - for a hefty price. Lead White it is particularly suited to the creation of fine impasto effects due to its ropey consistency, which can be manipulated into delicate peaks and cake-decoration-like swirls. 

Lead paint is fairly safe as long as the pigment is bound in the oil medium and not in a powder form, where it can be inhaled. You would not want to lick your brushes, as some artists I know have a habit of doing. I wouldn't recommend getting it on your skin either.

After the impasto has dried, a thin glaze of a contrasting grey or ochre is washed over it. The glaze collects in the depressions of the impasto, giving the impression of detail from a distance.

In Bridge of Sighs, Turner uses impasto only to pick out foci of interest, such as architectural details on the Doge's Palace. It looks as though he's used both an ochre yellow and a purplish grey glaze. Purple and yellow are complementary colours, so the effect, especially from a distance, is a kind of vibrating iridescence, later used by Monet to great effect to recreate sunlit walls.

Here are some photos the exhibition staff let me take (no flash allowed, so a little blurry, but better than I expected in the dimly lit gallery):

The last three images are details from the larger works.

More information about the exhibition here.

Golden Skies

Constant Troyon, A Clump of Trees, c.1860
George Inness, The Brook.

These works by Constant Troyon (top) and George Inness, make use of the golden light of dusk to suffuse the scenes with a sense of mystery. Warm golden hues - yellows sometimes with a touch of orange and red - are the perfect foil for dark grey-green foliage, creating a mood of soothing harmony.

The American landscape painter George Inness was so influential that he is often called "the father of American landscape painting". 

In his mature period, Inness discovered the spiritual writings of the Swedish mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg. The late paintings are poetic and mystical, with landscape views that are more intimate and personal, and a handling of shapes that is more abstract and nebulous than the earlier, more descriptive paintings.

In a published interview, Inness maintained that "The true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist's own spiritual nature." His abiding interest in spiritual and emotional considerations did not preclude Inness from undertaking a scientific study of color, nor a mathematical, structural approach to composition: "The poetic quality is not obtained by eschewing any truths of fact or of Nature...Poetry is the vision of reality."

-Wikipedia

The glowing golden skies in these works would probably have been created by applying transparent glazes of a warm yellow over a white underpainting.

Geroge inness, The Monk, 1873.

Maple Screen, Hasegawa Tohaku.

It's possible that Inness was influenced by seeing the gold leaf backgrounds of Japanese folding screens (Byōbu), or it may have just been the symbolic association gold has with the Eternal.

John Nash

John Nash:
1. A Path Through Trees, ca. 1915.
2. Gloucester Landscape.
3. The Cornfield, 1918.









The English painter John Nash is perhaps best known for his work as a war artist. His depictions of the horrors of WW1 had a great impact.
These landscapes show a deep love and understanding of nature, and even though he was largely untrained, and the works have a naive quality, they are also often executed with a fine sense of craftsmanship. He was also a print-maker.
He was a lover of Dora Carrington (bottom painting), and a major influence on her work.

Dora Carrington, Farm at Watendlath, 1921


Here's a link to a post about this period of British landscape painting, on the blog Art and Architecture mainly: two exhibitions of British landscapes