LECTURE

ROME IN THE IMAGINATION OF J.W.M. TURNER

A Lecture by Hendrika Foster, on 26 November 1998

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the idea of Rome, the city, was inextricably linked with Ancient Rome, the Republic and the Empire. The literature of ancient Rome formed a central part of the education of the British upper classes, who were
patrons of art.

“Go thou to Rome, - at once the Paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness”
Shelley, Adonais XLIX

Shelley’s words epitomise the change from the response to Rome by eighteenth
century Grand tourists, men of the Age of Enlightenment, to the nineteenth century
men of the Age of Romanticism. This statement of course encompasses a broad generalisation. Indeed Reynolds wrote in 1786, Discourse XIII,

“...the Arts... address themselves only to two faculties of the mind, its imagination and its sensibility.”
The response to Rome in the paintings of Turner had its roots in the theories and taste
of eighteenth century England. His early literary influences were those of the eighteenth century, but he re-interpreted them in a format more acceptable to the progressive ideas of the nineteenth century. Current ideas of aesthetics combined with a classical education and further inculcated with travel to Italy, created a sense of
hierarchy in the art world which resulted in the desirability of allusion to the ancient world in paintings of the first rank.
Turner’s first classical landscape, Aeneas and the Sibyl: Lake Avernus 1798, was
inspired by Virgil and Henry Colt Hoare of Stourhead, Wiltshire; and was probably more a response to the seventeenth century artist Claude and Stourhead garden than to Rome, but it was an important beginning. Turner first visited Italy and Rome in 1819. He kept no diary of his travels, his sketchbook attests to the progress of Turner the topographer who examined Rome with minute attention, stimulated by his earlier
reading of Virgil and Ovid, history by Livy and Goldsmith, and contemporary travel books, notably A Classical Tour through Italy by Eustace, 1813.
The paintings produced after this visit were far from topographical, and epitomised
the artist’s complex range of intellectual and aesthetic response. The Bay of Baiae,with Apollo and the Sybil, 1823, displays a poetic rendering which combines an awareness of natural beauty together with the historic remains. Turner typifies the warm indolence of Southern Italy, combined with an awareness of Ovid, Claude and of Eustace's description of Baiae as “the receptacle of profligacy and effeminacy, of lust and cruelty...”. The painting evokes thoughts of the passage of time, fading
beauty, mortality and decay, juxtaposed with the faded glory of the ruins and the undoubted beauty of nature.
After a second visit to Rome in 1828 Turner exhibited Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,
1836, which depicts the Byronic realisation that the glorious past included the decadence, and similarly that the ruins possessed a grandeur and beauty of their own within the overgrown and decayed surroundings. Three works exhibited
together in1839, Ancient Rome, Modern Rome and Cicero at his Villa, juxtapose the concepts of ancient and modern Rome, past and present, to indicate a contemporary understanding of Roman history. The ruins can be seen as emblems of the fragility and transitoriness of greatness, a vanitas for glory. The paintings evoke a notion that the Roman past was an important force in the nineteenth century and did not merely provoke an aesthetic response.
Turner's genius responded to Rome in the topographic, the evocatively poetic and the
sublimely imaginative.

“..Musing I lay: warm from the sacred walks
Where at each step imagination burns.”
Liberty, 1748,Thomson
Hendrika Foster

During the discussion, The Fighting Téméraire was mentioned, which Hendrika Foster analysed as evoking the idea of past greatness. She pointed out his sense of humour in including a hare on the railway track in front of the steam engine The Greyhound in Rail Train, Speed, a picture in which he tried to capture the fright of people seeing a train for the first time.
His architectural and scenic pictures were often of places he had not seen and were allegorical, but of high technical achievement.
Turner was raised in a barber’s shop and apprenticed at 14. He became an Associate of the Academy seven years later and then Professor of Perspective. He continued experimenting throughout his career and never reached his pinnacle.

Carol Baker