The "Great Bear" and "the prince of the evil spirits": The American response to J. M. W. Turner before the advent of John Ruskin. (Volumes I and II).
Item
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Title
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The "Great Bear" and "the prince of the evil spirits": The American response to J. M. W. Turner before the advent of John Ruskin. (Volumes I and II).
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Identifier
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AAI9325161
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identifier
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9325161
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Creator
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Wallace, Marcia Briggs.
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Contributor
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Adviser: William H. Gerdts
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Date
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1993
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Biography
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Abstract
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Even before John Ruskin's widely read Modern Painters swept Americans off their feet, they were taken with J. M. W. Turner. This dissertation is a study of their response. (An overview of the American reaction to Turner after the middle of the century and therefore after the publication of Ruskin's volumes is presented in the conclusion.) The first chapter of the dissertation assesses the impact of the great number of fine prints after Turner's designs, which flooded the market and established his reputation in America during the first decades of the century. The importance of these prints cannot be overestimated; they were, for the most part, the only contact Americans had with Turner's art. Written commentaries on Turner, also surveyed in the first chapter, reveal a wide range of opinion. Indeed, this divided reaction suggested the title of the dissertation. Washington Allston, who was admiring, likened Turner to the stars of the Great Bear constellation, while Thomas Cole saw him as "the prince of the evil spirits." An assessment of the artistic reaction to Turner (begun in the first chapter) includes brief studies of a number of artists who were active during the first half of the century: Robert Salmon, Alvin Fisher, Thomas Doughty, William Henry Bartlett, Alfred Jacob Miller, George Loring Brown, and others. Asher B. Durand and James Hamilton warranted more detailed discussions. Allston and Cole are each treated in lengthy chapters of their own. Allston, who was introduced to Turner's work during his first stay in London, demonstrated his interest as early as 1804 with his Turneresque seascape, Thunderstorm at Sea. But perhaps the Turners that Allston saw at Petworth House during his second stay in England and just before returning to America in 1818 had the most substantive impact, one which can be measured in his late American landscapes. Cole was first exposed to Turner through prints, which were available in New York where he settled in 1825. The impact of Turner's great historical landscapes, however, which Cole first viewed in London in 1829, outweighed even that of the prints. For Cole shared with Turner a lifelong committment to landscapes "elevated" with "poetic" content. His impassioned protestations of distaste for the so-called excesses of Turner's art, expressed after his initial enthusiastic reaction in 1829, obscure neither his artistic debt to the English painter nor the common ground between them.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
