Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead.Turner was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich) I842, 9I x I22 cm. Clore Gallery,
One of the most extraordinary and daring of Turner’s pictures; end. wild and confused as it
appears, one as nearly approaching to actual fact as it is possible for the hand of man to paint. Turner was not one who painted without
experience. Vast as his imaginary drawings were, there is not one which is not based upon actual fact; the glorious reproduction in one complex
image of mental impressions of various truths under the influence of an unexampled imagination. But here the image is more realistic, and the
working of his mind has not resulted in a picture of “bowery loveliness.” but of one of the most terrible phenomena of nature—a snowstorm at sea.
Nothing grieved Turner more than the way this picture was received by the public. A critic compared it to soapsuds and whitewash. “Soapsuds and
whitewash!” Turner was heard to repeat to himself. “What would they have, 1 wonder! What do they think the sea ‘s like? I wish they ‘d been in
it:
Turner once witnessed a scene like this, and no entreaties could prevail upon him to
go below; so he was lashed to the mast for four hours, and saw it out. “I did not expect to escape,” he skid, “but felt bound to record it if I
dkI.’ There is something of the infinity of nature in. this picture, which has no beginning and no end; the sky is joined to the sea, the smoke
to the cloud—the whole watery, misty world is fused together, and the ship itself seems to be incorporated with the elements. This is the truth
of the picture, more strange than fiction, and less easy to be believed by those “who have eyes and see not”
Ruskin's opinion of this
painting is that this is the grandest statement of sea motion, mist and light that has ever been put on canvas.
The painting above is the central detail not from the Turner Snow Storm but from my attempt for demonstration purposes. Note I bent the mask
even more than Turner's. I also put Turner tied to the mask, as he was said to have been!
Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps. was the first picture with which Turner
printed lines of poetry in the catalogue with a credit to an 'MS' poems 'Fallacies of Hope'.
Turner's pictures were becoming arranged, compositionally, around 'vortexes', in which the picture emanates from a central
structure in a series of sweeps, as above for example. He also experimented with new forms, such as squares and octagons. His was always a
deliberate in development. The painting reveals the extent to which Turner sees the style of the brushwork itself as a factor of the impact of
the painting.
| 
