The Frick Collection is no ordinary place. I enter one of the museum’s free nights. The bubbles rise in glasses of champagne, the violin plays, and the water of the fountain bubbles. The Industrial era mansion, centrally located on museum isle with a view of Central Park, is there not only as a monument to its owner, but as a gift to the public. Henry Clay Frick knew that when his family no longer needed the mansion, it would be opened as a museum to the public, and so it was written in his will. The wealthy industrialist had an eye for the fine arts, and spent his days collecting some of the finest Europeans masters that we hold up as exemplars of what Europe at its cultural peak has achieved. As I slowly made my way through the intimate collection, one painting caught my eye. It was William Turner’s “Harbor of Dieppe”. The faded harbor was overtaken by a yellow orb. The sun had a divine quality about i, that draws the viewer in.
Painted in the romanticist style, it was one of Turner’s many brilliant landscape paintings. The painter famously said, “The Sun is God”. For historical context this painting became popular after the Napoleonic wars ravaged Europe and the Enlightenment Era had left its mark. Westerners were fleeing the confines of organized religion, embracing individuality, spirituality, and natural beauty. The romanticist emerged in response increasing industrialization and an increasing commercial Europe.
If we force ourselves to step closer to the canvas, out of the sun’s mesmerizing rays and into the shade of the shoreline, we will find ourselves in the mundane human world. In the right background, Turner captures a scene which is familiar to us, a crowded marketplace. We can almost feel the burden of the humid air as it seeps from the steaming sidewalk and into our swelling lungs, smell the intoxicating aroma from vendors, and hear the clanking of coins as they exchange hands. The people in the painting are occupied by the commercial activity which rules their lives, oblivious or perhaps even apathetic to the glorious landscape before us. In the right foreground, two figures, a man and woman, clumsily fumble with their oversized hands as they load goods onto barge. The stark contrast between their pale skin and bright yellow and red clothing, as well as Turner’s sparse use of detail, only spotlights their disproportionate figures.
One may be inclined to attribute these crude figures to Turner’s lack of skill in illustrating the human form. Though for many landscape painters such as Ruisdael this was the case, as they devoted their study solely to landscape painting, Turner studied figure drawing at the Royal Academy. In fact that’s all he studied there, meticulously sketching figures from statues and when judged to be good enough, which Turner quickly was, from the nude. If Turner possessed the skill to depict the human form to his desire, why would he contort and simplify, the people in The Harbor of Dieppe? Turner did not simply set out to paint attractive landscapes, but rather to revolutionize landscape painting, to bring the genre from darkness and into the light as a high art. At the time, the highest esteem was held to paintings which depicted the human condition. The President of the Royal Academy, Joshua Reynolds, glorified mankind by idealizing the physiques of his subjects, much like Michelangelo. Similarly, many of Turner’s contemporaries exalted the prosperity of society, celebrating man and his accomplishments.
