DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports

Passages through Time

Ian Warrell author Susan Grace Galassi author Joanna Seidenstein author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Yale University Press

Published:7th Feb '17

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports cover

An engaging look at one of the central motifs in the work of the great 19th-century painter

Widely considered Britain’s greatest painter, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) is best known for his light-filled landscapes and seascapes. A relentless traveler, Turner often turned his artistic attention to the theme of modern and ancient ports. In the mid-1820s, Turner exhibited two monumental, and controversial, paintings of ports: Cologne and Dieppe. Shocking for their intense luminosity and yellow tonality, as well as for Turner’s unorthodox handling of paint, these works marked a transition in the artist’s career as he moved away from naturalism and toward a new, poetic topography.
 
This in-depth study of these two seminal paintings also addresses a wide selection of Turner’s works in both oil and watercolor from the 1820s, placing them in the context of radical changes in British social and economic structures taking place at the time. Drawing from period travel accounts, contemporary critical commentary, and new technical analyses of Turner’s work, this magnificently illustrated book brings a fresh, new perspective to the pivotal middle years of Turner’s career.  

Published in association with The Frick Collection


Exhibition Schedule:

The Frick Collection, New York
(02/22/17– 05/14/17)

“[T]his lively, attractive book takes as its subject two key paintings, Harbor of Dieppe: Changement de Domicile and Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet-Boat: Evening . . . present[ing] an informative, accessible discussion of Turner’s art.”–CHOICE * CHOICE *

ISBN: 9780300223149

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 1270g

176 pages