ART: PRIVATE VIEW
Turner on the Seine Tue to 3 Oct Tate Gallery, London SW1
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Your support makes all the difference.The Tate Gallery's reserves of Turner material are vast. There are nearly 20,000 works, into which curators dip to mount new shows, and the reserves continue to fuel some fine exhibitions, most recently "Turner on the Loire" and now, with a shift up country, "Turner on the Seine".
Turner was a frequent visitor to France, especially to Paris in the 1820s, and he published two instalments of engravings on the subject of the Seine. What we have here are the studies and sketches in gouache and watercolour that gave rise to the Seine engravings. The topography of Northern France comes and goes, but as ever the fleeting effects of light and weather were as much on his mind as what the place actually looked like.
His ostensible subjects - Paris, of course, and up river to Rouen and Le Havre - are more familiar from the works of the French Impressionists, but here's the proof that Turner was 40 years ahead of them in geography as well as so much more.
Tate Gallery, Millbank, London SW1 (0171-887 8000) Tue to 3 Oct
Richard Ingleby
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