Turner: In Light and Shade – an 'enlightening' exhibition

Upnor Castle, Kent (1831-32): fusing precise drawing with 'poetic ecstasy'

(Image credit: The Whitworth, University of Manchester)

From Remainers to Reform UK voters, from Mike Leigh to the Bank of England's note-makers, everyone seems to agree that Joseph Mallord William Turner "was our greatest artist", said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. And his many admirers are in for a treat this year. This spring marks the 250th anniversary of Turner's birth, and the first of several events commemorating the milestone is this "enlightening" exhibition in Manchester.

Fans shouldn't go expecting the dramatic oil paintings for which Turner is best known: the display is first and foremost a showcase for the Whitworth Art Gallery's "superb collection" of the painter's works on paper, notably an "electric" series of 71 "sepia-toned" landscape prints entitled the "Liber Studiorum", or book of studies, published between 1807 and 1819. The show's title refers to Ruskin's comment: "He paints in colour, but thinks in light and shade." Throughout, Turner astonishes with his "eye for the complex truth of space", capturing ruined abbeys, pastoral scenes and stormy skies in images that fuse "precise drawing" with "poetic ecstasy", revealing "what a thoughtful, patient" observer of the world he was. It is a fine birthday tribute to "Britain's favourite painter".

Turner took printmaking especially seriously, said Gabrielle Schwarz in The Daily Telegraph. Often dismissed as merely a means of rendering an existing image "infinitely reproducible" – and thus a lesser art form – the medium still demands an immense amount of skill. Turner's chosen technique, mezzotint printing, was particularly difficult and "time-consuming", requiring careful preparation of the copper plates onto which images were engraved. Unusually, only a handful of the prints that make up his "Liber Studiorum" are based on completed paintings; the rest are original compositions. He was also unusual in doing much of the engraving himself, rather than delegating the task to a professional. The results are often "astonishing": it's extraordinary that the "roiling seascape" of "Ships in a Breeze" (1808) consists "of nothing more than dots of brown ink held in the grooves of a copper plate".

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The little details in these prints are lovely, said Nancy Durrant in The Times. In a view of Mount St Gothard in the Alps, for instance, Turner captures a tired donkey dwarfed by the vast misty peaks in the distance. Yet it's his handling of light and atmospheric conditions – "the clouds and the foam and the fine sea spray, the shadows and reflections, the puffs of smoke and bursts of flame" – that "take your breath away". You emerge from all this into a gallery of watercolours, showing "a golden evening glow" inside a cathedral and "purple moonlight on Lake Lucerne". The colour comes as a pleasant shock "after half-an-hour luxuriating in the warm brown depths of the mezzotints next door". What a "gorgeous display" this is.

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