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Nancy Bauer

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Two things got me reflecting on J.M.W. Turner: a review of a Turner exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a Simon Shama DVD about the man. I went down to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery to peer again at his The Fountain of Indolence (1834). I have always liked it, but a while ago an artist whose opinion I respect said he wasn't moved by it. I bought a postcard reproduction and have it propped up by the computer.

I've been interested in the painting ever since the P.E.I. artist Daphne Irving told me in an interview that Turner's tremendous ability to paint light in The Fountain and in Goldau, had led her to use her art to explore the mystical life, the spiritual state and the metaphysical questions that were preoccupying her.

In Bruno Bobak: A Full Palette, Gordon Smith writes, "The art Bobak saw during his European travels [1957-60] greatly affected his own painting, especially works by Turner, Monet, Munch, and Kokoschka." The painting of light in Bobak's Vancouver [1962] reminds me very much of Goldau and of The Fountain of Indolence, at least as the painting is reproduced in the book.

Shama calls Turner's The Slave Ship "the greatest British painting of the 19th century." In that work, in The Fighting Temeraire and others, there is a luminosity that Shama calls "fairy dust," casting something magical over the whole scene. The spaces within the U or V shapes of the compositions are filled with light.

The New York Times reviewer, Roberta Smith, calls the Turner exhibit a "beast of a show." There are nearly 150 works and the sheer number "will either win you over or wear you out. Or it will alternate, gallery by gallery, or wall by wall, as the art swings between overblown and moving, inspired and mechanical." The Fountain of Indolence isn't mechanical, whatever else it is; it's a mysterious picture. What is that object in the left foreground, highlighted by a shaft of light; is it a fishing rod? What kind of trees are they on the left, towering over the scene? They appear in other of Turner's paintings. Their trunks are odd; how did the artist paint that strange line in one fell swoop?

My eyes were drawn to the left of the painting, away from the central fountain, to the pool with a swimming man and the fishing rod, in a line with a mill and water wheel, and above that, a ghostly village and castle. Shama points out in other of Turner's later paintings that the figures are like rag dolls, and that is true of The Fountain of Indolence too. Since the young Turner was noted for his ability to paint figures, why does he do this, Shama asks. These later paintings are about "light, air, and water," but they are also about the tragedy of the human condition. Did Turner think that indolence was an unhappy state?

Smith writes that Turner "looked back to classically inspired painters like Poussin and Claude, who sprinkled their landscapes with temples and people in togas"‚."‚."‚." There is a temple, but it, too, seems ghostly; the right side of the painting seems classically inspired, but the left side doesn't. It has been said that Turner was innovative, even a forerunner of Abstract Expressionism. Could the painting even be the forerunner of Surrealism?

"His complex legacy reflects his interests not only as an artist but also as a poet, naturalist, philosopher, and lover of music and theatre," Smith writes. The painting was perhaps inspired by Scottish poet James Thomson's The Castle of Indolence (1748) as The Slave Ship is said to have been by another of Thomson's poems.

Or softly stealing, with your watry gear,

Along the brooks, the crimson-spotted fry

You may delude: the whilst, amus'd, you hear

Now the hoarse stream, and now the zephyr's sigh"‚."‚."‚.

And later in Thomson's long poem:

Thus easy-rob'd, they to the fountain sped

That in the middle of the court up-threw

A stream, high spouting from its liquid bed,

And falling back again in drizzly dew.

Thomson's poem seems quasi-comic. Is The Fountain of Indolence meant to be comic?

I have enjoyed studying this one painting. Often, going through a gallery, I get indigestion, worn out, as Smith writes. Choosing just one painting and studying it has been downright stimulating. What does it all mean? When I went back to the gallery to look once again at it, I saw something I hadn't seen before. In the left foreground is a man draped in greenery, lying on the ground. If I hadn't been looking closely, I would have missed him. His is the only face delineated carefully. Could it be a self-portrait? The face certainly looks like a self-portrait drawing I printed out from the internet.

Nancy Bauer is an arts columnist who lives in Fredericton. She can be reached at wbauer@nbnet.nb.ca.