The young JMW Turner’s painting Salisbury from Old Sarum will be one of the attractions at a major 2015 exhibition at Salisbury Museum concentrating on the artist’s fascination with the town and with the architectural heritage of Wessex.
Salisbury has had quite a week: judged by the Lonely Planet guidebooks to take seventh place in their list of the world’s ten top cities to visit in 2015. Washington DC was top of the list with Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second city, taking sixth place and Toronto at number ten.
There were announcements about the city’s celebrations of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta – the Great Charter on which much of our ‘rule of law’ is based.
Finally there was news of Salisbury Museum’s major Turner exhibition titled Turner’s Wessex: Architecture and Ambition. The exhibition will run from 22 May to 27 September 2015.
It has been selected by Turner scholar Ian Warrell to give a picture of this “brilliant young artist, driven by self-belief and limitless ambition, grafting his way in the world.”
The inventive and dizzying watercolours at the heart of the exhibition, reassembled for the first time since 1883, will show how commissions from Wiltshire’s great patrons provided the crucial springboard for the career of one of England’s best-loved artists.
Building on recent popular exhibitions, particularly the 2011 exhibition exploring Constable’s links with the area, Salisbury Museum will showcase Turner’s meteoric rise as he worked for two very rich patrons in the Salisbury region.
Turner first visited Salisbury in 1795 when he was 20 years old. As his career developed, he returned to paint an area that captivated him as an artist. Set in the vast plains of the Wessex landscape, his depictions of Stonehenge in particular proved to be among his most hauntingly atmospheric works.
In the late 1790s, Sir Richard Colt Hoare commissioned Turner, then barely into his twenties, to produce a series of watercolours of Salisbury, the most impressive of which depict the newly restored great cathedral. Hoare was a wealthy gentleman-antiquarian who inherited the nearby Stourhead estate in 1784.
Another of Turner’s local patrons was William Beckford, described by Byron as ‘England’s wealthiest son’. Turner turned down a commission to work with Lord Elgin in Greece in favour of Beckford’s much more lucrative commission to paint the famous folly Beckford was building at Fonthill.
The third part of this exhibition will chart Turner’s fascination with the wider Wessex region – spanning the area of Wiltshire around Salisbury, as well as the Dorset coast, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.
It culminates in Turner’s record of the historic visit made by the French King Louis-Philippe to Queen Victoria in 1844 – the first such visit to England since the fourteenth century when Magna Carta was still quite a novelty.
[Click on the picture to enlarge it.]
