Research on The Harbor of Dieppe

One of the first things I learned about JMW Turner is that he was not principally an oil painter; his medium of preference was watercolors, of which he produced over two thousand works, whereas he created all of five hundred and fifty oil paintings in his lifetime (“Turner Society Homepage”. Retrieved 16 February 2013). The painting itself was derived from a sketch made by Turner on a trip to France in 1821, and was a work in progress until its initial exhibition in 1825.

As i’d suspected, the colors used to paint Dieppe were, usually, recent inventions; cobalt blue, which was available as a pigment from 1802 onwards, was first found in oils by Turner as early as 1806-7. Chrome yellow, which was available in 1814, was adopted by Turner in 1814. Other pigments he used included pale lemon chrome, chrome orange, and white lead (Townsend, 41) All of these pigments, with the exception of white lead, were initially viewed with suspicion by more traditionalist painters at the Royal Academy in Britain, as there were doubts that these pigments could stand up to the effects of time and associated oxidation (Townsend, 35).

More importantly, though, Turner’s initial exhibit of The Harbor of Dieppe received mixed praise and criticism. The Literary Magnet, a popular outlet for art criticism at the time, called it “Mr. Turner’s brilliant experiment upon colours, which displays all the magic of skill at the expense of all the magic of nature (Butlin, 127).”  The New Monthly Magazine (15, 1825, p. 300) called it “...perhaps the most splendid piece of falsehood that ever proceeded from the pencil of its author” and continued:

it should be seen from the colouring of the picture, as if, after the artist had finished it according to the best lights that Nature had chosen to furnish him with, he had felt totally dissatisfied with his work, and had determined to heighten it up to his own ideas of what Nature might have done for it if she had chosen!

(Butlin, 127)

Both pieces of criticism are essentially correct; the colors used in Dieppe are unnaturally bright, and do not accurately reflect the type of sunlight that would shine on a port town in northern France. However, these critics are missing the forest for the trees; the light is the subject matter of the painting! This is not an objective rendering of the port, rather, it is Turner’s objective experience of Dieppe, which was colored by his earlier trips to Italy (esp. Venice) and other sun-bathed parts of the mediterranean.

I, who have feasted on a steady diet of dramatic television shows and thriller movies, believed that this painting had a hidden message or story to tell, hiding perhaps in the face of one of the characters. My leading question in this research was; “What is the subject?” What I didn’t realize, though it was in front of me the whole time, was that Turner’s subject was sunlight. The town and its inhabitants are merely the supporting cast of Turner’s long-running study on the effects of light and the elements on civilization.

Works Cited:

Butlin, Martin, J. M. W. Turner, and Evelyn Joll. The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner. pp. 126-7. New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Tate Gallery by Yale UP, 1977. Print.

Townsend, Joyce, and J. M. W. Turner. "Turner The Colourist." Turner's Painting Techniques. London: Tate Gallery, 1993. N. pag. Print.

Pt. 2

The first thrust of my research was a multi-pronged question; why was Dieppe painted in its peculiar way, and what techniques did Turner use to render it that way? At first I thought the answer would lay in biographical information, as any artist has presumably suffered some drama in his life, so I pored over multiple biographies at Bobst. What I found, though, was no starving artist; the man came from a middle-class family in London, and by the time he died, the proceeds from his paintings had netted him the modern equivalent of £14,000,000. The only noted ‘tragedies’ in his life were that his mother died in a mental asylum when he was in his mid-twenties, and that he never married (though he fathered two children by a long-term mistress). He was a noted recluse for much of his life, and his only true friend was his father, who served as his studio assistant for thirty years. This information, though interesting, explained nothing.

What helped more was the discovery that Turner had mastered traditional forms of painting (historical and mythological scenes) by emulating the 17th-century masters by the time he was twenty, and that during his mid-to-late career, “He anticipated the French Impressionists in breaking down conventional formulas of representation; but, unlike them, he believed that his works should always express significant historical, mythological, literary, or other narrative themes.” (from Britannica online) In other words, he felt like his paintings should mean something, both to himself and to his audience.

I did find a few snippets of information about Turner’s trip to Dieppe, which showed that he did not spend much time or effort in sketching the town. However, other than looking at biographies, scanning assorted The life and works of.... -type books did not help me glean any information about my painting in question; there was no mention of the piece except in the two books listed above. Much more attention was paid to works such as Dido Building Carthage, which uses a similar light-scheme, and Dordrecht the Dort Packet-boat From Rotterdam Becalmed, the sketch for which was created in the same era of his life. From these, I had to conclude that any further research on the topic would have to be indirect.

The little book titled “Turner the Colourist”, wedged between much larger tomes, yielded the exact sort of information I needed; details about the pigments the artist used! With this, I came to see Turner as something of an innovator - an early adaptor, so to speak, in the art world of his time. This also helped to explain why contemporary art critics were so harsh about his color scheme in Dieppe and in his watercolor paintings; they had never seen canvases that bright before.

My research was very methodical, in that I pored through a few dozen books, scanned through JSTOR hits for “JMW Turner” and “The Harbor of Dieppe”, but any mention of Dieppe was in relation to the WWII battle fought over that town - not about the iconic painting. I believe that I was researching the wrong question; it should not have been a simple “Why was Dieppe painted?” Instead, I should have been asking “What themes and elements was Turner trying to paint at that point (1821-6) in his career?”

Although I’ve realized this only after conducting my initial research, Goulish’s essay on criticism applies to this endeavor in that it advocates taking one singular approach to the painting. I cannot hope to understand everything about it, therefore I must focus on one aspect of the painting in order to better appreciate the whole. My focus, then, will be on examining this piece as part of Turner’s transition from romanticism to proto-impressionism, and perhaps looking post-mortem to see if his works had any influence on the likes of Monet and Gaugin.