Joseph Mallord William Turner

1775 - 1851 • English • Painter • Romantic

"Innovations so daring and so various could not be introduced without corresponding peril; the difficulties that lay in his way were more than any human intellect could altogether surmount." - John Ruskin, 1873

A major characteristic of ROMANTICISM was a rebellion against convention and the assertion of individualism, and one sees that in Turner's early painting Snowstorm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps ( 1812), a large work, almost 8 feet long. Turner created an apocalyptic snowstorm in which SUBLIME, all-powerful nature is seen in the furious circular movement of wind and snow creating an awesome vortex that overwhelms human presence. Only barely and gradually is the scene on the ground understood: a drama of rape, murder, and pillage, Hannibal on his elephant hardly in focus. As the historian Robert Rosenblum writes, "... we seem located in a molten caldron of the imagination." Turner here combined his own experience of being in a violent storm on his visit to the Alps with his reading about Hannibal's 218 BCE excursion. He had also seen Jacques Louis DAVID's extraordinary painting Napoleon at Saint Bernard (1800; see EQUESTRIAN), where the name of Hannibal is carved into a rock. It may be, as Rosenblum suggests, that Turner was expressing a British fear of Napoleonic conquest. The affect of this snowstorm, in which forms lose their contour and the world is transformed into veils and movements of color and light, became increasingly characteristic of Turner's painting. If he made an indirect reference to David in Hannibal, his painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying-Typhoon Coming on (1840; known as The Slave Ship) brings to mind GERICAULT's Raft of the Medusa, painted some 20 years earlier. As was Gericault's, Turner's picture was founded on a real, scandalous event. In 1783, the captain of a slave ship had thrown sick and dying slaves overboard so that the owner could collect insurance on the claim that they were lost at sea. When Turner painted The Slave Ship, the slave trade had long been banned in England, but slavery itself had only recently been abolished in the colonies. RUSKIN, whose comment about Turner is quoted above, was the artist's great supporter.