Turner. Eric Shanes

to these processes. This was recognised even before his death in 1851 by some astute critics, especially John Ruskin, who in his writings extensively explored the artist’s grasp of the ‘truths’ of architecture, geology, the sea, the sky and the other principal components of a landscape or marine picture.

      In order to create idealised images, throughout his life Turner followed a procedure recommended by Reynolds. This was ideal synthesis, which was a way of overcoming the arbitrariness of appearances. Reynolds accorded landscape painting a rather lowly place in his artistic scheme of things because he held landscapists to be mainly beholden to chance: if they visited a place, say, when it happened to be raining, then that was how they would be forced to represent it if they were at all ‘truthful’.

      Richmond Hill

      c. 1825

      watercolour, 29.7 × 48.9 cm

      Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, Cheshire

      In order to avoid this arbitrariness, Reynolds recommended another kind of truth in landscape painting. This was the practice of landscapists like Claude le Lorrain, who had synthesised into fictive and ideal scenes the most attractive features of several places as viewed in the most beautiful of weather and lighting conditions, thus transcending the arbitrary. Although Turner gave more weight to representing individual places than Reynolds was prepared to permit, this individuation was largely offset by a wholehearted adoption of the synthesising practice recommended by Reynolds (so much so that often his representations of places bore little resemblance to actualities). As Turner would state around 1810: