Unlimited beauty

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 19th November 2008

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

This is a small show of only 30 works, but it includes many to exclaim over. Among the most notable is the dark maelstrom of the Upper Falls of the Reichenbach, a wonderful work (look at the way Turner has scored and rubbed the paper to let the white through) of a setting made sinister for all readers of detective fiction as the place where Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty struggled to the death. Much sweeter is ‘View of Bregenz’ (1840), in coloured chalks and gouache, less structurally emphatic yet nonetheless very charming. Another river painting, ‘Falls of the Rhine at Schauffhausen’ (?1841), shows how Turner managed to convey much with minimal means. A different mood is caught by the watercolour of Colchester, featuring the castle in its huddle of trees above a scene of hare coursing beside the river Colne. A reviewer in The Spectator of June 1831 wrote, ‘a picture whose wild reality and truth are like Rembrandt’s landscapes’. Other beauties include a couple of storm studies at Margate and the famous howling dog in ‘Dawn after the Wreck’, copied by Ruskin.

The excellent display around the walls of the third-floor gallery is matched by a further group of works in the centre of the room on table easels, including an exquisite view of ‘Abingdon from the Thames Navigation’. In this painting Turner, never one to copy the facts slavishly if alteration improved his picture, has re-invented the lock. What does it matter? It’s a ravishing piece of painting.

In addition to the Turner display there’s a selection of glories from the Scharf bequest of British watercolours, to be found through a gallery of moderns at the rear of the Turners. In 2007, the collector Dorothy Scharf left 51 watercolours and drawings to the Courtauld, mostly dating from 1750–1850, the much-loved Golden Age of watercolour painting. Just a handful of these are now on view, but what a handful — even without the Turners they make a visit to the Courtauld worthwhile. The first is a lovely John White Abbott ‘On the Dart, From Holme Chase’ (c.1800), all inked lines and flat colours, a crisp and atmospheric design. This method of composition Abbott learnt from Francis Towne, whose most gifted pupil he was. Elsewhere in the room hangs Towne’s own ‘Llyn Cwellyn’ (1777), a magisterial panorama of mountains, valley and light, conjuring the most extraordinary sense of space from pale washes of colour.