They also brought his work to wider audiences, and allowed him to celebrate different parts of the British Isles. In fact, after 1811, Turner became so impressed with the quality of contemporary engraving, that he undertook an increasing number of publishing projects. However, Turner's new-found status did not mean that he was going to put mere 'map-work' – as fellow Academician, Henry Fuseli, called it – behind him. It made his position as the country's leading landscape painter unassailable. This was followed by his appointment as the Academy's Professor of Perspective. By 1807, he began publication of his Liber Studiorum, a survey of different types and styles of landscape art illustrated by his own work. Since then, the artist had come a long way.Įlected Associate of the Royal Academy in 1799 at 24, the youngest permissible age, Turner became an Academician in 1802. The earliest of these, The History of Whalley, published in 1800, which also happened to be the first such volume for which the young Turner drew the plates. Dr Thomas Dunham Whitaker, vicar of Whalley in Lancashire, who already had a string of scholarly histories to his credit. Seven volumes were planned apart from Turner's landscape views, the buildings were to be drawn by John Buckler, besides images of tombstones, inscriptions, and other documents. Farington's own History of the River Thames, illustrated entirely with hand-coloured aquatints, had been a notably lavish example, while the antiquary John Britton had an entire stable of draughtsmen and painters busy on projects.īut none of these had engaged the scale of capital investment that the publisher Longman committed to The General History of the County of York. The recent wars with France fuelled a hunger for images of Britain. Since the appearance of Thomas Hearne's Antiquities of Great Britain in the 1770s, watercolour painting and antiquarian publishing had advanced hand-in-hand. Yet it was reported that Turner originally asked 40 guineas. Three thousand guineas – 25 guineas for each watercolour – was a colossal sum. He proposed to set off very soon for Yorkshire to collect other subjects." Many of the subjects required, he said, he had now in his possession. What these signifiers signify, however, are less the sites they depict than the photographs upon which the paintings of those sites were based.The news was already the talk of the London art world then on, as they were filing into a banquet at the Mansion House, the veteran painter Joseph Farington came alongside Turner to check the details for himself, which he duly noted in his diary: "Turner told me that he had made an engagement to make 120 drawings, views of various kinds in Yorkshire, for a History of Yorkshire, for which he was to have 3,000 guineas. Yet they do have something to say, and contemplating their weird reticence suggests that these are cues, prompts or notes, scripted in pictorial shorthand. Offering neither a complete view (which might be historically interesting) nor a detail so small as to be indistinguishable from an abstraction, these architectural part-images function so obliquely they almost don’t function at all. Though painterly, and occasionally exaggeratedly so, the works at Kantor Gallery fall flat. Silhouetted against the inevitably blue sky are views of the Pacific Design Center, the facade of Nate ‘n’ Al’s restaurant, a flag flying off of the top of Museum Square on Wilshire Boulevard and the seesawing letter R of the Roxy. I am tempted to say that Henry Vincent’s smallish paintings of familiar Los Angeles buildings are accidentally interesting, which is to say their humor caught me totally off guard.
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