Turner and the Masters

And finally- harder than the others because my ability to think about paintings is so limited in comparison so my thoughts are going to be far more limited.

First impressions are that I'm not sure I like Turner as much as I thought I did. There were some beautiful paintings such as Dido at Carthage which really are magnificent. But, and perhaps this is a point of the curation, looking at his work next to a variety of different painters I became quickly bored with his colour schemes. They attribute his sun light to Claude Lorrain and he uses it with greater skill, I feel then Claude. But it appears so often you grow a bit weary of it. When used adroitly it's quite staggeringly beautiful- but it's always a relief when he tries something different.

Often this is when he is trying to ape Rembrandt- the one master he doesn't seem to get near, although he arguably mimics his style far more than the others. I realise now I need to look more at Rembrandt. There's a painting of the Holy Family which is technically extraordinary in the way the light spreads from a lamp at the centre of the painting. The anachronism of the painting upset me though.

I tried hard to see where things were being copied but I often found it quite difficult to see, particularly in terms of style. Turner's colours are always honeyer, often I feel to the detriment of it. His paintings are also, and excuse my total ignorance on technical issues, deeper. They stretch far further back, giving everything a far grander scale and making the characters at the front seem smaller and more pawns in the scheme of the world. I think that's why I found his painting of trafalgar so effective. It just seems to go on and on, with huge boats and fighting and sails and so the bloodied floating corpses in the foreground seem ever smaller. Certainly compared to a lot of the other work I noticed how three dimensional the images were. So many others felt a bit like those childrens books where you stick on pictures onto a background.

The other thing that struck me is that he did a rather nice painting of another painter (Watteau I think) which had a sort of shambolic intimacy I'd never seen before and I hope there is more of his stuff out there. It is in some ways quite a large tableau, with paintings and easels and models and sketches but without his legendary sky it loses all sense of the epic but is none the worse for it.

Finally my favourite painting of the day belonged to someone I'd never heard of called Francis Danby. It is a giant angel, head above the clouds in sun and legs below in a dark, red ominous sunset. I can't even remember what the Turner it was being compared to but that was certainly one he lost (I put every two up in head to head. Turner won many but less then I thought he would).

I have to say though, as someone uneducated in art it was a real pleasure to have such an exhibition which really helped to try and look at art. My big regret was being a tightwad and not getting the headphones as I'm sure I'd have learnt lots more. So my new vow is to always take along either someone who know about art or the headset. Here endeth the lesson.