Unlimited beauty

Paths to Fame: Turner Watercolours from the Courtauld
Courtauld Institute, Somerset House, WC2, until 25 January 2009

For instance, look at the centrepiece of the exhibition, placed on the central panel in the gallery, the famous ‘Crook of Lune, looking towards Hornby Castle’ in North Lancashire. This magnificent watercolour, dating from c.1816–18, is a marvellous example of Turner’s technical virtuosity, with various methods of applying and removing the paint (stopping out and scratching away), and the sharpest possible eye for the telling detail that reveals the true nature of a landscape. Next to it hangs a colour beginning for the picture (from the Tate), an abstract study of colour shapes that is actually substantially larger than the finished picture. To complete the ensemble is a sketchbook in the cabinet below, containing Turner’s pencil notations of the subject, though rather faint and difficult to decipher in this context.

The show starts chronologically with an early study of the Avon Gorge featuring Old Hot Wells House (quite a famous spa in its time, until a number of people died of drinking the waters). Turner would have been 17 when he painted it, and already there’s an unusual inventiveness to the composition besides its vigorous and dramatic delineation. Then there’s a lovely pencil drawing of Tom Tower at Christ Church, Oxford, spare and rhythmic and topographically correct, unlike the slightly adjusted watercolour next to it which takes liberties with the visual truth for the sake of the drama of the design. The drawing of Tewkesbury Abbey is altogether more picturesque and feathery, the crisp lines of the architecture overgrown somewhat. Nearby are a couple of views of Bonneville in Savoy, including another colour beginning which (like the Crook of Lune one) has an abstract beauty all its own.