Guest blog by Dr Francesca Vanke- Senior Curator at Norwich Museums
Here in the City of Stories, we’re home to Norwich Castle- you might have noticed it above the city skyline. And what’s more, Norwich Castle is home to some amazing exhibitions, such as it’s current major exhibition ‘JMW Turner and changing visions of landscape‘.
Senior Curator at Norwich Museums, Dr Francesca Vanke, talks us through some of its central themes and reflects on curating a wonderful selection of Turner’s and other pioneering landscape artists’ works.
Here at Norwich Castle, the final exhibition in the series curated around Walton Bridges by JMW Turner has just opened. Norfolk Museums acquired this wonderful painting in 2019, as a result of a temporary export bar, thanks to the generosity of The National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF), the Art Fund and a private donor.
JMW Turner (1775-1851), Walton Bridges, c1806, oil on canvas, Norfolk Museums Service
Part of the agreement with the NLHF was that we toured the painting around the region, and created a series of exhibitions and events with the painting as their focus. Since 2019 it has been displayed at Colchester Castle, and part of the Landscape Rebels exhibition at Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich. I have also curated exhibitions around it at Lynn Museum, and Time and Tide Museum in Yarmouth. This show at Norwich is the final one in the series, and also the largest.
There is enough material in any painting to allow for more than one exhibition, and Turner’s work is always rich in possibilities. I was wondering which angle to take for this show. When I discovered that Turner had painted the bridges at Walton several times over, making each view look completely different, I thought I would explore more about the idea of seeing, and what we see when we look at a landscape.
It was not unusual for Turner to paint a scene many times – his approach was all about exploring landscape in intense depth, so he very often portrayed the same place numerous times, to capture all the infinitely varied nuances of light and atmosphere, at different seasons or times of the day. At an early stage in my research, I wondered if I could borrow any of his other versions of Walton Bridges, to compare them with ours.
JMW Turner (1775-1851), Landscape with Walton Bridges, mid 1840s, oil on canvas, private collection. Photograph © Sotheby’s
As it turned out, this was indeed possible. Two of Turner’s interpretations, painted around the same time as ours, are in Tate, and a much later version, dating from around the mid-1840s, is in a private collection. Generously, Tate and the private owner agreed to lend.
There is also another oil painting in Australia, which was not practical for us to borrow, and a couple of other watercolour versions, in Tate and in the Ashmolean. For reasons of space, and because the two watercolours were similar to the paintings we already had, I decided ultimately not to borrow these, although they all appear in the catalogue. Curating is about deciding what to leave out as well as what to include.
I also discovered that the Walton Bridge Turner portrayed was not the first bridge built in that same spot over the Thames, but the second of six. Half a century earlier, in 1754, the Venetian artist Canaletto had painted another Landscape with Walton Bridge – which depicted the first bridge. This work belongs to Dulwich Picture Gallery, who have kindly also lent to this exhibition. Comparing these, it was fascinating to see not only how different the first bridge was (it was made mainly of wood, an elegant lattice structure, much lauded at the time) but also how different the appearance of the landscape was as a whole. We would of course expect every artist’s approach to be different, but Canaletto, with his eighteenth- century eyes, had entirely different priorities to Turner, and a different attitude to nature.
Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal) (1697-1768), A View of Walton Bridge, 1754, oil on canvas, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
I have been able to borrow both oil paintings and watercolours by Turner from museums and private collections so, including our oil, and two watercolours, we have a total of 16 Turners in the exhibition. This is a good number, but I knew I would also need to include work by other artists. I decided to make a virtue of this necessity. Therefore, thinking about Turner’s multiple ways of seeing, and comparing it with that of other artists, like Canaletto, I started exploring a range of questions: what affects the way we see landscape? What do landscapes mean to different people, why, and how have these meanings changed? Landscape itself, and landscape art, have their own histories, both equally complex and fascinating.
I ended up with a melting pot of ideas and possibilities, from which the themes of the exhibition gradually developed. To demonstrate where Turner himself was coming from, I chose to start with some of the artists most influential on his development. His approach was undoubtedly incredibly original and considered very daring and ‘modern’ for his time, but he did have very definite artistic antecedents. These included the work of some famous seventeenth-century European artists: the Frenchman Claude Lorrain, and Dutch painters like Jacob van Ruisdael. Artists like these also had a significant influence not just on Turner but also on the growth of landscape painting as a genre in Britain, and in continental Europe more widely.
There were many other angles to explore apart from just the historical. Turner was an artist who, unlike many others of his time, did not only paint idealised scenes of history or mythology. He was interested in depicting everyday modern life and labour and engaged with contemporary issues. So, this exhibition looks also at more complex and political aspects of human relationships with landscape past and present: ownership, identity, access, exile, and war. Turner covered many of the issues around these themes in his work.
Similarly, although concern for the environment did not assume the looming, overwhelming importance it does today, Turner’s work did also show an awareness of the pollution resulting from the rapid industrialisation of the landscape in the early nineteenth century. We have included pictures by several contemporary artists who are responding to the rapidly changing climate. These include Emma Stibbon, who records fragile environments around the world. In 2018, she followed the route Turner had taken when he visited the Swiss Alps and compared his drawings with how the same mountain scenery looks today. Stibbon found that several of the glaciers Turner portrayed were no longer there, due to the warming climate.
Emma Stibbon (b 1962), Ice Cloud, Antarctica, 2019, print on paper, Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. Photograph © Emma Stibbon
As well as looking at serious contemporary issues, the exhibition considers landscape as a source of wellbeing and happiness. A section devoted to light, so central to Turner’s entire career, displays two of Turner’s beautiful watercolours of sunsets, allowing visitors to enjoy these while comparing them to later artists’ interpretations of sunlight. These include Here/Everywhere by Nepalese artist Govinda Sah, who first encountered Turner’s work as a student in Kathmandu and has been influenced by him ever since. For the last few years Sah has lived in Margate, observing and painting the same light-filled skies and coastal landscapes which also inspired Turner when he lived there in later life.
Govinda Sah ‘Azad’, Here/Everywhere, 2023, oil and acrylic on canvas, © Govinda Sah, courtesy the artist and October Gallery, London
Finally, the exhibition explores how landscapes appeal to the imagination. Turner often gave his landscapes a literary context, using landscape features such as rugged mountains, stormy skies or soft-coloured fields as characters in a narrative, suggesting a wide variety of stories.
JMW Turner (1775-1851), Dolbadern Castle, North Wales, c1800, oil on canvas, Royal Academy of Arts, London
Artists today are still doing the same thing. But I wanted to include work by contemporary artists who are moving far beyond traditional narratives, using the landscape genre to explore different stories, relevant to the wider, more diverse audiences of today. These include lens-based artist Jermaine Francis, whose work is strongly influenced by traditional landscape painting, from Claude Lorrain to Turner. In the A Storied Ground series, from which Rio, They/Them England – featured in the exhibition – is taken, Francis draws upon English pastoral imagery and turns a critical eye on the idea of English monoculture. By placing lesser-known histories of Black presence within idyllic rural settings Francis disrupts traditional ideas of who belongs in the countryside.
His work, alongside other contemporary contributions, revitalises the exhibition and looks forward to what the future of landscape art may bring. Turner, who determinedly took landscape painting in new directions throughout his life and maintained an abiding enthusiasm for recording the landscapes and people of the present day, would have approved.
Jermaine Francis, Rio They/Them, England 2021, photographic collage on paper, © Jermaine Francis
