More Matter with Less Art: Romantic Attitudes toward Landscape Painting

Abstract

“… Dusty sunbeams up or down the street on summer mornings; deep furrowed cabbage-leaves at the greengrocer's; and Thames' shore within three minutes' race”: in Ruskin's Modern Painters these are among the sights of Turner's Covent Garden boyhood that durably shaped the sensibility of the mature artist. The tawdry vitality of Turner's surroundings in Maiden Lane, we learn, attached him ever after to “market-womanly types of humanity,” to dirt and smoke, things fishy and muddy, prolific litter, red-faced sailors, to fishing boats and to shipping of all kinds — these latter the “only quite beautiful things he can see in all the world, except the sky.”1 Ruskin's account could not of course have been furnished from the exiguous statements left by the painter. His evocation of Turner's early milieu is akin to the character-shaping environment of the Victorian novel; expanding on some few known circumstances it constructs an ambience charged with light, movement, physical detail, and a coherent social climate. ...