Visualising the Dawn of Modernity: Sunrises by Turner and Monet.

By Eden Binjaku

J.M.W. Turner’s Norham Castle, Sunrise (1845, fig. 1), with its dual colour palette, airy paint application, and hazy undefined forms, may be cast as a precedent for later modernist experimentation in depicting light and atmosphere. There is debate whether it is a study, intentionally unfinished and not meant for display - as Turner is known to have created watercolour samples for commissions or to test ideas about “what pictures might be or what collectors and critics would one day understand." Considering the latter, perhaps Turner’s atmospheric sunrise was ahead of its time. Whether finished or unfinished, it can only be fully appreciated in comparison to succeeding developments. In particular, Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872, fig. 2), renowned as the painting after which the Impressionist movement was named, serves as an intriguing comparison due to its shared subject matter, in addition to a concern for atmospheric effect, light, limited palette, and visible painterly technique. The vastly different artistic movements they convey (Turner being a Romanticist and Monet, an Impressionist) reveals even more intriguing implications behind their sunrises.

Figure 1: J.M.W. Turner, Norham Castle, Sunrise, 1845, oil on canvas, 90.8 x 121.9cm, Tate Britain, London.

Turner limits his palette to complementary, juxtaposed tones of light blue (the sky and water), dark blue (the silhouette of the castle on the horizon), bright yellow (the sun and its reflections), and ochre (landscape and animal figure detail). This increases the ambiguity of the scene, achieving an evocative formlessness rare for his times. Furthermore, Turner’s colours appear to dissolve into each other like mist - some blue areas disappearing into white - yet deftly avoiding pictorial confusion in his precision. This is achieved through a slow process of painting in thinly diluted paint, in a similar manner as watercolour. Turner’s ‘solids,’ in addition to the rising sun, were added over the underpainting in a thicker application. An unconventional technique for the time, a pallet knife may have been used to create fractures in the sun rays and ochre land masses. This deliberate visibility of process reveals he was thinking about how to capture the effects of light and reflection through fundamental yet evocative means. The attention to coolness, warmness, air, liquid, and solid through simplified colour tones and application reveals an attentive study of atmosphere and perception, albeit emphasised and filtered through sensory and emotional response.

In Turner’s Royal Academy Lectures on colour during the 1820s, his interest in optics is expanded:

"Turner selected the six major hues found in Harris's 'prismatic' wheel; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple [...] noted the qualitative differences between the mixture of coloured rays and pigments. He observed that while light rays (red, blue, yellow) when mixed produce white, a mixture of the same three colours in pigments resulted in destruction of the colour [...] this should be avoided in painting for colour properly employed 'aids, exalts, and in true union with lights and shadows makes a whole."

The study of light and optics would continue to develop and, arguably, peak in parallel to the Impressionist movement - their treatment of colour being informed by M. E. Chevreul’s 1839 theory “The Law of Simultaneous Contrast of Colours.” His conclusion, that "if you look simultaneously upon two stripes of different tones of the same colour, or upon two stripes of the same tone of different colours placed side by side [...] the eye perceives certain modifications which in the first place influence the intensity of colour, and [....] the optical composition of the two juxtaposes colours.” The representation of white light, as informed by Chevreul’s colour theory, could finally be based on scientific method, rather than approximation.

Figure 2: Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872, oil on canvas, 48 x 63cm, Museé Marmottan Monet, Paris.

Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (fig. 2) manages to capture the essence of a time and place as seen in the moment, through a study of optics. His painting takes the observation of colour to a new level, not just creating an emotive atmosphere as Turner does, but in depicting the nature of visual perception itself.

This spontaneous quality of this painting that landed the term “Impressionism”- though intended as criticism at first - had only been used to describe sketches before. Impressionist consideration of their sketch-like works as finished was radical. The practice of painting in plein-air allowed for capturing the instantaneous and momentary impression of a scene. A quote by a student of Monet describes his approach:

“When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you—a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it gives your own naïve impression of the scene before you.”

Monet uses a complementary colour palette, comprised of blues (the misty sky, water, industrial/dock silhouettes) and oranges (the blazing sun and its reflection) placed side by side with transitory colours – blue tones are highlighted by the inclusion of streaks of green and violet; orange amplified by yellow. This creates the sense that the light affects the colours of the space and objects around it, our optical perception producing the appearance of new ‘in-between’ tones. It is said that Monet always used colours directly from the tube, utilising raw juxtaposition rather than mixing and layering.

To return to the sketch-like quality, Monet uses expressive and large strokes of paint for the sky, echoing the dramatic movement of clouds, the water is similarly reflecting the sky but has thin, short brush strokes of blue creating ripples in the water, and small strokes of orange that create the reflection of the sunrise. Silhouettes of the board, dock, and industrial scene are added in sketch-like strokes of blue. Monet captures the essence of the scene at dawn, transcribing its movement and dynamism through his varied and expressive mark making. The sun is a glaring orange circle in this composition – arguably the protagonist of the work -- whose luminous effects on the atmosphere the artist takes as his subject.

In both Turner’s and Monet’s sunrises, painting is freed from the requirement to depict refined illusions of reality and naturalism, in favour of transcribing subjective perceptions. The viewer is invited to share in the eyes of the artist, in an experience which centres light. Nonetheless, they do this by different means: if Monet captured the impression of light, then Turner captured its sensation. Norham Castle’s sun inspires a sublime awe in Turner which transforms all he can see, sensation and reality intermingling via colour and brushstrokes. Impression, Sunrise, on the other hand, acts as the “eye” which describes the sunlight’s transformation of all things visible: Monet’s is a fleeting moment, observed en plein air, to which we are privy through his hasty brushwork. Ultimately, the artists transform the process of painting and the role of vision, to differing effects. Recent scholarship on the undefined haziness of 19th century landscape paintings such as those of Turner and Monet, draw connections to atmospheric pollution during the industrial revolution. In light of this, it is a field has vast potential for relevant interdisciplinary study when related to the visual culture of modern industry.

Bibliography:

Baum, Kelly, Bayer, Andrea, and Wagstaff, Sheena. “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.” Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016. Finley, Gerald E. “Turner: An Early Experiment with Colour Theory.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 30, 1967, pp. 357–366. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/750750 .

Gardner, Helen, and Kleiner, Fred S. “Gardner's Art through the Ages: a Global History.” Cengage Learning, 2020. Llewellyn, Nigel, and Riding, Christine. “The Romantic Sublime” in The Art of Sublime, Tate Research Publication, January 2013, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/the-romantic-sublime-r110 9221

Mallord, Joseph and Turner, William. “An Eye for Art - Questioning Traditions”. National Gallery of Art, pp.129-132. PDF www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/Education/learning-resources/an-eye-for-art/AnEyefo rArt-JosephMallordWilliamTurner.pdf Paintings by Turner and Monet depict trends in 19th century air pollution. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2219118120

Roque, Georges. “Chevreul and Impressionism: A Reappraisal.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 78, no. 1, 1996, pp. 27–39. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3046155 .