Private Turner: Watercolours and Paintings

Despite the coronavirus, the Musée Jacquemart-André has a great retrospective of the work of JMW Turner (1775-1851), with the “Turner, peintures et aquarelles de la Tate” exhibition. Running to January 11, 2021.

The Musée Jacquemart-André is paying tribute to one of the best-known English artists and the greatest representative of the golden age of English watercolours. The exhibition is also available online for a virtual tour.

This major retrospective features sixty watercolours and ten oil paintings, some of which have never been exhibited in France. All these works come from the Tate Britain in London which houses the largest Turner’s collection in the world.

Apart from his finished works intended for sale, Turner kept a considerable collection of works for himself, stored in his house and studio.

These sketches were certainly closer to nature than those he painted for the public.

In 1856, after the artist’s death, an enormous collection of works was given to the British nation, comprising many oil paintings, unfinished studies, and sketches, as well as thousands of works executed on paper: watercolours, drawings, and sketchbooks.

The writer John Ruskin, who was one of the first to study the entire bequest, observed that Turner had executed most of these works for his ‘own pleasure and delight’.

Now held in the Tate Britain, the collection highlights the incredible modernity of the great Romantic painter.

The exhibition will display part of this private collection, which provides illuminating perspectives about Turner’s mindset, imagination, and private works.

The show is organised chronologically, enabling visitors to follow Turner’s artistic development, from his youthful works—which attest to a certain topographical realism and which he sent to the Royal Academy—to his mature works, which were more radical and accomplished, as fascinating experiments with light and colour.

Displayed in this exhibition alongside various finished watercolours and oil paintings to illustrate their influence on Turner’s public pictures, these highly personal works are as fresh and spontaneous as they were when first set them down on paper.