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.
“Some of his landscapes are very British, but he has this violence of nature, presence of human beings struggling in it,” said Andrei Pop, a professor of art history at the University of Chicago. “You could imagine him becoming interesting again to people worried about or fascinated by extreme weather, climate change, the environment.”
“Fishing Boats with Hucksters Bargaining for Fish” dominates the Byron Laflin Smith Gallery on the second floor of the Art Institute. Golden sunlight illuminates the scene, but that’s where the tranquility ends. A wall of charcoal clouds threatens to engulf the fishing boats, their sails filled almost to bursting. The fishermen’s profiles lack detail, but it’s not hard to imagine stomachs churning, faces shading green.
On the opposite wall of the gallery, Turner painted an almost apocalyptic scene in the much smaller “Valley of Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche, and Thunderstorm,” in which sky, rock and snow swirl together into a hellish maelstrom.
“He spent a lot of time out in the landscape, sketching, drawing. He clearly had a brilliant memory. Then he just developed a technique for bringing in these bright, extraordinary colors and playing with lighting effects in order to give these crackling atmospheres to the paintings,” Bowyer said.
The son of a barber/wig maker, Turner was a bit of an oddity, portrayed as a grunting curmudgeon in the 2014 film “Mr. Turner,” with actor Timothy Spall playing the painter. Though he mixed in upper-class circles, Turner never tried to erase his lower-class Cockney accent.
He painted at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and was fascinated by technology. One of his best-known paintings, “Rain, Steam, and Speed” (housed in London’s National Gallery) features a steam train hurtling into view, perhaps a metaphor for the inevitability of progress.
“He’s telling you what matters here — the weather, this kind of natural substance that’s being yoked to human transportation: steam,” Pop said. “And speed, which is something that artists couldn’t really depict.”
Bowyer, like Pop, says the current climate crisis gives viewers a whole new way to look at Turner’s work. Pop sees another connection clawing through the swirling mists of the painter’s work into the present.
“The role of being impressed or being bludgeoned by an artwork — in many ways, that has shifted to video games or kind of a disaster blockbuster. I definitely think someone (in the present) will find Turner interesting. You could say Turner’s storms gave birth to our constant parade of disaster films,” Pop said.
Turner died in 1851 at the age of 76. He bequeathed many of his works to the country of his birth. The majority of his paintings are housed at Tate Britain in London.
Turner’s works occasionally make it onto the auction block, including the painting “Depositing of John Bellini’s Three Pictures in La Chiesa Redentore, Venice,” which fetched $33.6 million at Christie’s in New York in November 2022.