Tate Britain: Turner Online

Talking Turner

' I am the great lion of the day .' - JMW Turner

Turner's art has always been controversial. This section shows how artists and writers such as Constable, Ruskin, and Matisse responded to his work; we have also invited a number of present day artists, writers, historians and others to talk about Turner, or about a particular work in the new displays in the Clore Galleries.


Archbishop of Canterbury Jane Asher Aubrey Beardsley Christopher Le Brun Peter Cockroft John Constable André Derain Michael Fish	William Powell Frith Adam Hart-Davis William Hazlitt Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell Siân Lloyd Sue MacGregor Tim Marlow Henri Matisse	Michael Palin Cornelia Parker Leslie Parris Ezra Pound Richard Redgrave David Roberts John Ruskin James Wilson

Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
on Turner's Angel Standing in the Sun
'The Angel Standing in the Sun is Turner demonstrating something of the terror of light ...'

Jane Asher
on Turner's Sun Setting Over a Lake
'Of course if I could describe in any way adequately just what this picture manages ...'

Aubrey Beardsley
on Turner
'He is only a rhetorician in paint...'

Christopher Le Brun
on Turner
'I find him the most open of painters. The transparency of his light is an everpresent sign of how he achieves complete fluency ...'

Peter Cockroft
on Turner's Heavy Dark Clouds
'The weather and the sea have played an important part in my professional and personal lives...'

John Constable
on Turner
'I was a good deal entertained with Turner.'

André Derain
on Turner
'Turner authorises us...'

Michael Fish
on Turner
'His paintings have a special significance for me, not least of all for his depiction of the weather...'

William Powell Frith
on Turner
'When I say that Turner should be the idol of painters, I refer to his earlier works and not to the period when he was half crazy...'

Adam Hart-Davis
on Turner's Llanstephan Castle by Moonlight, with a Kiln in the Foreground
'At the end of the eighteenth century ironworks were proliferating, and the new steam engines...'

William Hazlitt
on Turner
'The artist delights to go back to the first chaos of the world... All is without forms and void...'

Ben Langlands & Nikki Bell
on Turner
'Turner anticipated modernity and the ever increasing speed and immediacy of communications...'

Siân Lloyd
on Turner's The Parting of Hero and Leander
'What first struck me about this painting was the clarity of the moon. With a storm brewing you wouldn't really expect ...'

Sue MacGregor
on Turner's
Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore
'The sea in Turner's pictures is either flat calm or dangerous, roaring and tumbling...'

Tim Marlow
on Turner
'Turner is a wonderfully contradictory figure: the passionate academic painter and the reluctant experimentalist, a man obsessed...'

Henri Matisse
on Turner
'Turner lived in a cellar. Once a week he had the shutters suddenly flung open...'

Michael Palin
on Turner's Snow Storm: Hannibal Crossing
'This is a work full of contrasts. The black cloud arches over a sunlit valley ...'

Cornelia Parker
on Turner
'Turner was a master of capturing the intangible in paint, increasingly pushing his subjects to the point of vaporisation, pulling them back from the brink only when they threatened to disappear...'

Leslie Parris
on Turner
'Turner is the great virtuoso of English landscape art, the man who took on everything and everybody...'

Ezra Pound
on Turner
'There are two kinds of artists: 1) Waterhouse who painted perhaps the most beautiful pictures that have ever been made in England...'

Richard Redgrave
on Turner
'His short figure had become corpulent - his face . was unusually red, and a little inclined to blotches...'

David Roberts
on Turner
'His life partook of the character of his works; it was mysterious and nothing seemed to please him so much as to try and puzzle you or to make you think...'

John Ruskin
on Turner
'Introduced to-day to the man who beyond all doubt is the greatest of the age; greatest in every faculty of imagination...'

James Wilson
on Turner
'Turner is strongly linked in my mind with Dickens - and not just because of the Dickensian strangeness of his life...'

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