The Art Institute of Chicago has two works on display by one of the world’s great landscape painters, J.M.W. Turner, born 250 years ago.
The English landscape painter Joseph Mallord William Turner hated to be upstaged.
In one episode, when he saw hanging beside one of his own paintings a more vivid piece by his great rival John Constable, Turner added a splotch of bright red paint to his own work.
Constable, in a story so often repeated it has become art history lore, famously compared Turner’s one-upmanship to having “fired a gun.”
It wasn’t a one-off event at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, the famous school and gallery space and a society for artists.
“Turner would carry in what appeared to be a finished painting or something that looked vastly unfinished. Then he would stand in front of it, with everybody watching, and he would complete the painting through this bravura show of technique and speed,” said Emerson Bowyer, a specialist in 18th- and 19th-Century British and French art at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Two hundred and fifty years after Turner’s birth in 1775, the painter’s work still dazzles, still mesmerizes visitors to the Art Institute, which has two paintings, several watercolors and numerous etchings in its collection.
Turner was a master of capturing natural light, his setting suns scorching oceans in fiery hues of copper and bronze. He embraced the ferocity of nature: His seas churn and froth, while his clouds swirl with a potency that resonates today.
