The original painter of light

I’ve found that the 19th-­century Romantic painter Joseph Mallord William (J.M.W.) Turner (1775–1851) is often a student favorite in my art history classes. He was for me, too. In fact, Turner’s work was the nexus for possibly the most spiritual encounter I have had at an art museum.

In my classes, I introduce Turner at the end of the second semester after students have seen and studied hundreds of representational and recognizable works of art. There is something refreshing about the almost cinematic moodiness of Turner’s 1812 painting Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps.

The nearly indecipherable subject matter of The Slave Ship, painted in 1840, is the first time since prehistoric art early in the previous semester when students struggle with the question “What is that?” The loose brushwork, the push toward abstraction, and the socially engaged content of this painting foreshadow later artistic movements such as Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism.

J.M.W. Turner’s work feels almost prophetic, giving us our first glimpse of what art will be—what we already know art becomes.

Conservative art critic John Ruskin was a contemporary and a champion of Turner’s work, declaring him “the father of Modern Art.” At the time, Ruskin was an evangelical (though he deconverted midlife, he returned to Christianity when he was older). Ruskin believed that “all great art is praise.” This was especially true for depictions of mountains, oceans, and the sky—all of which abut a sacred, inexhaustible sublimity. For Ruskin, Turner’s mysterious, emotive paintings pursued the sublime more powerfully than any other Romantic painter.

The Slave Ship J.M.W. Turner

Unlike Ruskin, Turner was not a Christian. He attended a Methodist school as a youth and was an inconsistent parishioner at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the site of his burial. By most accounts, his spiritual beliefs were less Christian and more panentheistic—the belief that God is present in every aspect of the world. He famously, though potentially apocryphally, stated on his deathbed, “The sun is God.”

Long before Thomas Kinkade commercially marketed himself as “the painter of light,” that moniker was used to describe J.M.W. Turner. Light pervades his work. Even a morose painting such as The Slave Ship is marked by Turner’s use of light.

There have been a few art exhibitions in my life that I have found profoundly moving. One such exhibition was a Turner retrospective in Dallas several years back. I had studied Turner and seen his work in person before; however, I was unprepared for the spiritual impact of digesting 140 of his paintings in one afternoon.

The light in Kinkade’s paintings is often critiqued for its overt sentimentality. The original painter of light is not sentimental. For Turner, light does not evoke warm, nostalgic feelings of a simpler time. It is a physical reality. Turner did not simply paint the illusion of light. He painted light as if it were the most real and physical part of his paintings. Light passing through atmospheric haze and clouds, or even reflecting off other surfaces, was not weightless and formless. The paints that produced the illusion of light were thick, heavy impasto passages in the paintings. The reality of the light struck me as if it were the most real part of the paintings.

By contrast, buildings, bridges, and other physical objects in Turner’s paintings, especially those constructed by humans, were often formed from thin washes of paint. They were weightless, translucent, almost ghostly. They were recognizable but practically an illusion. The solidity of the buildings in Turner’s 19th-century cities paled against the physical reality of the sunlight—made concrete in the clouds.

In painting after painting, brick and stone are eclipsed by the materiality of light. The light, the ephemeral, dare I say the spiritual, was imminently more important than the transient bricks and stones that were so clearly passing away. In Turner’s paintings, the light and the spiritual were the most real.

Intellectually, I know that Turner did not share my Christian convictions. The manner in which he painted light in contrast to buildings resulted from Romanticism’s notions about nature conflated with his panentheistic worldview. But in the science building, which was next to the art building at the college where I used to teach, there was a sign in the foyer that declared, “All truth is God’s truth.”

Turner, maybe inadvertently, declared in his work the Christian truth that our reality is inseparably physical and spiritual. This world and all the wonders we construct are transient. They will pass away. But the light, what we see as transient and immaterial, is, in fact, what is the most real. The sun is not God, but the Son is Light.

—Rondall Reynoso teaches art and art history and is the founder of FaithonView.com