Turner At De Young

Thursday I braved the Peninsula traffic and drove up to The City to see the de Young Museum's special exhibition, J. M. W. Turner: Painting Set Free. (Vicki is not quite the Turner fan that I am: "too many boats"). The exhibition focuses on the last fifteen years of Turner's long and prolific career (1835-1850), at a point, established and acclaimed, where he could pursue his own interests and inclinations and ignore the press and his legion of critics. I thought it was quite a well done exhibition, especially relating his works in water color and their relation to his oil work. With the later Turner, especially, it is largely about light and color, and I am always looking for the seeds of Impressionism--Monet spent 1870-71 in London and doubtless saw some of the later Turner--and I was not disappointed.

Great museum in the Golden Gate Park

Burning of the Houses of Lords and of Commons, 1834

The Bright Stone of Honor...(from Childe Harold), 1835

Ancient Rome: Agrippina Returning with the Ashes of
Germanicus, 1839

Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory)--The Morning After the
Deluge--Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, 1843; not so
sure of Turner's biblical scholarship here, but he knew color 
and wrote authoritatively of it

Peace--Burial at Sea, 1842

Approach to Venice, 1844

One of several "Sample Studies," smaller water colors by
which Turner endeavored to snare commissions; this, The 
Blue Rigi (a mountain near Lucerne)

Whalers (Boiling Blubber) Entangled in Flaw Ice, 
Endeavoring to Extricate Themselves, 1846; it was not an age 
for short titles

Whalers, 1845; OK, except this one

Perhaps the most famous item in the exhibition, Snow Storm--
Steam-boat off a Harbour's Mouth...well, the title goes on and
on, including Turner's claim to have been aboard (lashed to
the mast, of course)...an incredible painting, despite the title

Not without his critics

Norham Castle, Sunrise, 1845?

Europa and the Bull, 1845?

The Visit to the Tomb, 1850; Aeneas and Dido visit the tomb
of  Dido's husband; part of a series on Aeneas