Met Museum: Turner's Whaling Pictures

The current exhibit, Turner's Whaling Pictures, at the Met Museum is understandably small since the entire series consists of four paintings only one of which, Whalers, is in the museum's permanent collection.  The other three are on loan from the Tate.

The four paintings were first exhibited by Turner at the Royal Academy in the hope that Elhanan Bicknell, a wealthy art patron whose financing of whaling expeditions had made him his millions, would be interested in buying the lot.  Bicknell did in fact purchase Whalers but then immediately returned it when he found traces of watercolor, considered an inferior medium, on the oil on canvas painting.

What's most interesting about these oversized canvases is the mastery of light that Turner displayed in painting them.  In this sense, the artist clearly anticipated the French Impressionists.  Subject matter is never clearly delineated but rather suggested while light itself becomes these works' true subject.  It's to the credit of British critics of the time that, if somewhat overwhelmed by the artist's stylistic innovations, they were nonetheless able to appreciate Turner's accomplishment in creating these powerful effects.

One cannot discuss any aspect of whaling without some consideration of Herman Melville's great novel, Moby Dick, published near the time of Turner's passing.  The relationship may, however, be more than incidental.  The exhibit contains a quote from the novel in which Ishmael, before leaving port, sees at a tavern a painting depicting a whaling scene.  Certainly the description from the novel could very well apply to Whalers, the only of the series in which a whale is actually depicted, but there is no real evidence that Melville actually saw Turner's work while visiting London.  It remains only a tantalizing possibility.

Although the museum's website doesn't list them, there are other items on view at the exhibit.  There is a small scale painting that Turner completed much earlier of a whaling scene that was to be used by an engraver as a source for a book illustration.  It is not a major work, however, and is useful primarily as an indicator of the great stylistic changes the artist effected toward the end of his career as he left literal representation behind.  There are also a few nineteenth century table lamps whose only real excuse for being there is that they burned whale oil.  More important is a copy of Thomas Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale once owned by Melville and on which he inscribed a note to the effect that it was this book that Turner, who had never actually seen a whale, used as a source in his paintings.  Finally, there is a sketch of the artist himself that renders him, even if unintentionally, more as a character from a Dickens novel than as one of England's greatest painters.

The exhibit continues through August 7, 2016.