Landscape with a River and a Bay in the Distance

Landscape with a River and a Bay in the Distance (Landscape with River and Bay )
Artist: Turner
Oil painting on canvas; Size: 94x123cm; Louvre, Paris.

"Pictures of nothing and very like," was how a contemporary critic described Turner's paintings. In fact vagueness was one of the charges laid against the painter, in addition to the opposite one of assigning too much importance to the content, by inserting pointless historical references into the representation of nature. The artist's last works are characterized by a dissolution of form, in which the confines between land, air and water are broken down. Nature is immersed in a dazzling and undefined glare, a pure realm of color, and the fluidity of the watercolor is transferred to the oil painting. In A la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust, taking his inspiration from Turner, describes a painter who "had been able to accustom his eyes not to recognize fixed boundaries, of absolute demarcation, between the land and the ocean." In the aesthetics of the infinite, even indeterminacy is a source of the sublime. This canvas painted around 1835-40 is connected with the engravings of the Liber Studiorum from many years earlier and was probably intended to represent the artist's late style in his bequest to the nation. It is not known exactly how it left the painter's studio, but it is presumed that it was among the unframed or rolled up canvases that were stolen after his death.
It was to defend the artist from the accusations of the critics that Ruskin had undertaken his colossal work on Modern Painters. "For the limited space and defined forms of elder landscape, he substituted the quantity and the mistery of the vastest scenes of earth." Turner had rescued landscape painting from the realm of the minor genres.