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

There’s a romantic black chalk drawing by Gainsborough, an imaginary landscape composition done while the poor man was confined to town painting portraits (often rather successfully, it must be said) for a living. Here you see what he dreamed of: a wooded Suffolk landscape with a cottage and cows. Among the other treasures are a superb Richard Wilson of the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, a good Edward Lear landscape of Greece and a Samuel Palmer of Sevenoaks. Constable is represented by a watercolour of Stanway Mill near Colchester, with rain lashing across from the left. One of the most enjoyable pictures is Richard Parkes Bonington’s ‘Fishing Boats Moored in an Estuary’, a typical subject expertly and evocatively handled. The Girtin of Tintern Abbey in blue-greys and browns, though fabulous in its way, looks almost dull in such company.

The Turner exhibition is accompanied by a handsomely produced catalogue (£20 in softback) of a size easy to handle, written and compiled by Joanna Selborne with additional essays by Andrew Wilton and Cecilia Powell. The exhibition was previously at Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum & Art Gallery in Grasmere. If you haven’t yet seen it, a visit is strongly recommended. The other Courtauld collections downstairs (Manet, Gauguin, Renoir et alia) make Somerset House a place of pilgrimage for any art lover.