This activity is made possible in part by a grant from WNET/PBS 13, New York, through PBS 8/WDSE, Duluth.

Rising from a modest background, J.M.W. Turner became the leading British artist of his era. Known for his technical brilliance and startling use of light and color, he incorporated references to literature, mythology, and historical events in his pictures, but also painted and sketched directly from nature. He transformed landscape painting through works that paid homage to the old masters, even while they pointed toward a new and visionary direction for 19th-century art. Turner also legitimized the role of watercolor as an experimental medium, and not simply as a way to produce “postcards” for tourists.

 

Turner’s paintings became increasingly abstract as he strove to portray light, space, and the elemental forces of nature. His late works of Venice describe atmospheric effects with brighter colors. Turner encountered violent criticism as his style became increasingly free, but was passionately defended by the established English portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence, and the youthful critic John Ruskin. Visionary, revolutionary, and extremely influential,

 

Turner’s late paintings laid the groundwork for European impressionism and post-impressionism. They are also hailed as early indicators of modern abstract expressionism and color-field painting of the mid-20th century.

 

Connecticut-born artist Gilbert Davis Munger (1837–1903), whose brother Roger settled in Duluth in 1879, spent nearly two decades in Europe, where he was influenced bu Camille Corot and the French Barbizon artists. At the suggestion of John Ruskin, who admired and defended Turner’s work, Munger went to Venice to paint in the 1880s. Munger was aware of the light and color-filled atmospheric effects of Corot and Turner, and he had the skill to reproduce their methods in his own art. Munger’s Venice paintings, conservative by
any other standard, were the most modern and abstract images he ever produced.