Wednesday, while it was 107 degrees in Carmichael, Gil and I drove to San Francisco. We had watched the CBS Sunday Morning TV show about two weeks ago and Jane Pauley did a piece on JMW Turner the artist. At the end of the piece she stated his paintings were on display at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. I was so impressed by his paintings and his history that I wanted to see the display. So off we went.
The above picture is the mural they did as you enter where his paintings are on display. It is huge - floor to ceiling tall.
We at first went into the exhibit without renting the self-guided earphone tour. After trying to read the descriptions next to the paintings and finding it was hard to get near enough to read, we went back out and rented the earphones. It made the pictures come to life with the descriptions of where and how they were painted and more life history of the painter.
Here are some of the paintings we saw:
He seemed to do a lot of paintings that had fires in them. The above is a watercolor. He used watercolor a lot as a sketching tool of something he would later put on canvas with oils. He also used pen and ink to sketch out his designs.
Below is the Burning of the Houses of Parliament. It was his depiction of an actual event. Up close you can see people who had come out in the night to see the fire.
The Exile and the Rock Limpet is the title of the above painting.
A lot of his paintings had a religious tone to them. It is An Angel Standing in the Sun.
The Sun of Venice Going to Sea is the name of the above. He loved Venice and did several paintings depicting life there. Look at that beautiful frame it is in.
The above picture is my personal favorite. It is also the one the museum chose to put as a mural you see as you walk in to the exhibit. It is called Snow Storm. The artist wanted a feeling of the sea during a violent storm. He went to sea on a ship and had the crew lash him high on the mast. After he came home, he painted this. The orange you see in the middle top of the painting is to be a flare sent up from a ship that is in distress. It is a breathtaking painting.
The above is a more traditional painting. He did several. The paintings on display at the museum were primarily his less traditional paintings.
If you want to see his complete works, go to his website at http://www.william-turner.org/. It has a short history of him there, too.
Here is a self portrait of the artist:
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