Portrayal of Weather in Art

Abstract

THE Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society for October contains a valuable paper by Mr. L. C. W. Bonacina on "Turner's Portrayal of the Weather". Landscape features and weather are the warp and weft of scenery, and the proper understanding of Turner's work as portrayer of scenery has been greatly hindered by the fact that such artists are described as landscape painters, and further by the circumstance that the salability of their work depends largely upon giving the picture a local name. Turner's pictures may be divided into two classes, those in which the motif is provided by the features of the landscape proper and those in which the motif is provided by the aspect of the weather; and the latter are probably the more important part of Turner's contribution to nature study. Mr. Bonacina's detailed discussion of notable examples of Turner's pictures in the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum deserves the careful consideration of students of both science and art. The attention of these specialists and also of persons of general culture may properly be directed to the following sentence in which the outlook of the author is strikingly expressed: "the co-ordination and unification of truth acquired on the one hand through scientific research and on the other expressed through artistic intuition are the intellectual needs of the age".