Originally Published in Print, February 2023.

Almost three years after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the National Gallery of Ireland announced an exhibition courtesy of the Tate Gallery in London: nearly ninety artworks by J.M.W. Turner on display in Dublin. Conceptualised by the Turner scholar David Blayney Brown, the Turner: The Sun is God exhibition opened to the Irish public in October 2022. In addition to displaying the well-known watercolours from the Henry Vaughan collection, the National Gallery is showcasing Turner’s sketchbooks and larger oil paintings.

To restore Turner to the present consciousness was a gesture of forcive renewal, and one that was desperately needed. His influence reverberated among artists and thinkers of the twentieth-century, from the early faces of modernism to the existentialists. What truly draws Turner apart from the crowd of his contemporaries, however, is his unflinching approach to the operatic drama and power of nature alongside his inventive, almost blasphemous, use of light and the sun to reflect human interiority.

The exhibition takes its title from something said by Turner a few weeks prior to his death in 1851. It is rumoured that the person to whom Turner declared “the Sun is God” was admirer and critic John Ruskin before the two had a falling out. A complicated professional and personal relationship existed between Turner and Ruskin, the latter was a lifelong follower of Turner’s work, especially as the Pre-Raphaelites rose to prominence. After Turner died, his entire body of work was left in the basement of the National Gallery in London, until Ruskin began sorting through them. Ruskin perceived Turner’s later work as “indicative of a mental disease.”  In fact, the questions surrounding  Ruskin’s alleged burning of Turner’s erotic drawings and letters have led to a decades long controversy. 

The sentiment that the Sun in God comes as no surprise to people familiar with Turner’s work. The artist became obsessed with light, once writing “Light is therefore a colour.” The National Gallery paints a picture of Turner out in nature studying the world, how light is simultaneously formed and formless. To paint light is to give form to light, but Turner’s experiments with wet-on-wet watercolour taught him that a person cannot rely solely on the creation of forms. His attention turns to the sun: geometric, perfect. In an era when the sun, a source of indescribable power, was still relatively uncharted, Turner used that mystery as a source of inspiration, bestowing it with a sequence of guises and mystical properties in his work. 

Nestled in the cloudfront or tracing lines across surfaces of water or land, the sun performs in Turner’s work, taking the central role: the prima donna, Turner’s sole muse. Everywhere and nowhere, the sun is wedged in a site of constant becoming. Overwhelmed from its throne, where it once began burning, the sun is given a freedom to create through its own dissolution. 

For some background, in 1900, the National Gallery was bequeathed thirty-one Turner watercolours and drawings by the English collector Henry Vaughan. According to Vaughan, light is its weakest in January and, therefore, ideal for protecting the watercolours from damaging natural light. The Vaughan Bequest, along with  another five watercolours, as well as Turner’s  Liber Studiorum prints, are maintained by the National Gallery and annually exhibited in January. In January 2020, the dawn of a new decade, the National Gallery unveiled a more expansive exhibition, including work by artists he influenced, titled Turner: The Visionary.

Turner’s  watercolours, in addition to posing questions of representation, operate experimentally on the levels of creativity and mechanics. Turner is regarded by art critics to have been the best watercolourist of his time. Turner painted wet-on-wet in most, if not all of the works at the Visionary exhibition. An example of his work using wet-on-wet is A Ship off Hastings; painted in 1820. This style of watercolour marks a departure from artistic control. They chart Turner’s protean evolution from an experimental young artist into a mature one. Wet-on-wet technique creates a formlessness that overwhelms some watercolour painters, but Turner’s use demarcates a small personal drama of escaping the shackles of strict representation. Indeed, an aesthete or a physicist would suggest that these paintings are created by natural forces, such as gravity or probability: the bleed blooms through the contours of water and eventually settles to dry. By surrendering control, Turner gains access to new ranges of expression that he explores using light. It is in these works that the figure of Turner emerges, down to the very fingerprints. 

The Turner: The Sun is God exhibition will be open at the National Gallery of Ireland until February 2023 in the Beit Wing with an admission charge. More information can be found at nationalgallery.ie. 

Cover Image: Norham Castle, Sunrise c.1845 by J.M.W. Turner. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-norham-castle-sunrise-n01981, Photo © Tate.