Displaying items by tag: JMW Turner

A JMW Turner street scene described as the greatest painting of Oxford will remain in the city after the Ashmolean Museum raised the money to buy it in just four weeks.

The High Street, Oxford, by Turner, was left to the British nation in lieu of inheritance tax, but its value of £3.5m was more than the tax due. That led to a fundraising campaign by the Ashmolean, where the painting has been on loan from a private collection since 1997.

A house designed by the painter JMW Turner as a country home to share with his father will be saved from dereliction and opened permanently to the public through a £1.4m grant to be announced on Wednesday by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

“We are just so excited, it is superb news – this house is a national treasure, but it is in a sad, sad state, and if we had to get through another bad winter without knowing whether we could go ahead with restoration, it would be truly worrying,” said Rosemary Vaux, of the Turner House Trust.

The most spectacular artistic rivalry in British history will be revived in September when blockbuster exhibitions by two of the nation's most renowned painters pitch them into direct competition, just as they were in their lifetimes two centuries ago.

The simultaneous shows unavoidably provoke the question asked ever since the artists were showing side by side in the Romantic age: who is the greatest British painter ever?

Is it Joseph Mallord William Turner, whose glowing, occasionally abstract, visions of sea and sky and the violent elements are celebrated at Tate Britain from 10 September? Or is it his contemporary John Constable, whose acute observations of the clouds, trees and changing light of his native Suffolk are examined at the V&A 10 days later?

One of the Taft Museum of Art's best-known paintings – "Europa and the Bull" by Joseph Mallord William Turner, circa 1845 – goes on display next month at the Tate Britain, one of London's foremost museums.

It will be there through Jan. 25, before traveling to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco as part of the exhibition "Late Turner: Painting Set Free."

The Peabody Essex Museum is presenting the largest U.S. exhibition of Joseph Mallord William Turner's maritime paintings.

"Turner & the Sea" features more than 100 works spanning the 50-year career of one of Britain's most celebrated painters. Encompassing oils, watercolors, prints and sketches from the 1790s to the mid-1800s, this first full-scale examination of Turner's lifelong attraction to the sea follows the artist's evolution from precocious young painter to one of the most important, controversial and prolific masters of his art. Dramatic and roiling, sunlit and cloudstruck, the power of Turner's glorious canvases changed the maritime aesthetic and influenced countless painters hundreds of years after his time.

London’s National Maritime Museum is currently hosting Turner and the Sea, the first large-scale exhibition to explore J.M.W. Turner’s lifelong fascination with the sea. The British Romantic painter, who is often called the “painter of light,” was drawn to the sea’s sublime yet dangerous nature and spent decades trying to capture its wild beauty.

Turner and the Sea includes 120 works from some of the world’s most prestigious institutions including London’s National Gallery, the Tate, the Yale Center for British Art, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Works on view range from Turner’s transformative paintings of the 1790s to his unfinished works created towards the end of his life. Highlights include The Battle of Trafalgar, Turner’s largest painting and only royal commission; Fishermen at Sea, the first oil painting Turner exhibited at the Royal Academy; The Wreck of a Transport Ship, which has not been seen in London since the 1970s; and The Wreck Buoy, Turner’s last exhibited marine painting.

Turner and the Sea will be on view at the National Maritime Museum through April 21, 2014.

Looking at the View, a sweeping display of 300 years of British landscape painting, opened at London’s Tate Britain on February 12, 2013. The exhibition coincides with the re-opening of the Tate Britain galleries, which were closed for renovations.

The show is part of the museum’s BP British Art Displays, a series that highlights contemporary and historic British art from its collection. Curated by Tate Britain’s director Penelope Curtis, Looking at the View illustrates the different ways British artists have interpreted and portrayed their surroundings over the past three centuries. The exhibition features works from the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite periods as well as paintings from the Land Art and other contemporary movements. Artists on view include J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), John Brett (1831-1902), Henry Lamb (1883-1960), Lucian Freud (1922-2011), and Tracey Emin (b. 1963).

Looking at the View, which presents over 70 works by more than 50 artists, is arranged according to motif and draws connections between artists from vastly different time periods and movements. It is on view at Tate Britain through June 2, 2013.

Over fifty major works totaling about $64 million were offered as payment to the UK for nearly $40 million worth of inheritance tax that accumulated between 2010 and 2012. Those in control of the estates of authors, artists, and collectors have been allowed to use cultural and historical artifacts to pay the tax since 1910.

The UK has recently received a number of masterpieces including two oil portraits of aristocratic families by Sir Joshua Reynolds, a renowned 18^th century English artist. One portrait will be placed in the Tate and the other will go to the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. Other works include two landscapes by JMW Turner; an oil sketch by Peter Paul Rubens titled The Triumph of Venus that will be placed in Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum; a work by Italian 17^th century master Guernico that has been allocated to the National Gallery; and four sculptures and three works on paper by Barbara Hepworth.

The ability to donate significant works to pay off inheritance tax has introduced a number of remarkable pieces to the UK’s galleries and museums, bringing monumental works out from behind closed doors and into the public arena.

Three paintings left to the National Museum Wales in 1951 by notable Welsh collectors, Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, have been reclassified as authentic after spending decades in storage. In 1956 it was decided that that the paintings, Off Margate, Margate Jetty, and The Beacon Light, were either fake or not fully by the English Romanticist J.M.W. Turner’s (1775–1851) hand.

Turner experts have examined the paintings intermittently during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to similar ends. Thanks to today’s modern methods such as X-ray, infrared, and pigment analysis, the seascapes were finally vindicated. The process unfolded on the BBC program, “Fake or Fortune,” proving that the paintings’ materials were consistent with the materials notably used by Turner.  

Although the three paintings’ values have subsequently skyrocketed, they will remain in the National Museum’s collection. The Davies sisters who built one of the most important Impressionist and 20^th century art collections in Britain, bequeathed seven Turner paintings to the Museum in the early 1950s. All of the paintings will go on display together starting September 25^th.