Turner's Modern Rome: Campo Vaccino

According to a French poet Charles Baudelaire, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in a choice of subject nor the exact truth, but in a way of feeling.” Joseph Mallord William Turner, an English painter was known for his illuminated Romantic paintings of landscapes and seascapes. He was known to observe and record the things that surrounded his world. Tuner’s paintings, Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino (1839) is an envisioning of the Eternal City in Rome, and Long Ship’s Lighthouse, Land End, (1834-35), are waves with a barely visible ship in a storm, westernmost point of England, are both located at the J. Paul Getty Museum. When his career advanced he began to pay less attention to details, and more about the atmospheric

An artist technique can be viewed as the foundation of the artist’s style. However, one’s technique does not stay the same forever, as a person grows, they change, so therefore the artist’s work will also change. Turner’s sceneries were detailed with scraped, blotted, and wiped the paint while it was still wet. “My businesses is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.” When Turner paints, he paints from observation and experience, and his techniques capture how the texture really looks like and feels like. “His individual catalogue entries are mostly largely descriptive and interpretative of the content and supposed allegory of the specific drawing and lack much of the basic art-historical material that would seem essential to this reviewer.” In Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino, the techniques show cross-hatching on the dry paint, and brush strokes. His technique in this painting shows fine details, from the ancient monuments to the modern buildings. In The Long Ship’s Lighthouse, Land Ends captures transparent washes in the sky, also scratches that are directly on the paper render the spot of light on the waves. His technique in this painting is not as detailed instead, it becomes more like an abstraction. Not only can technique make a painting interesting, color enhances the atmosphere and the feeling of a

Light brings a painting to life by emphasizing features through highlights and shadow that brings depth in, but used incorrectly can leave a composition dull and lifeless. If the highlights are in the wrong place or a shadow is painted in the wrong direction can imbalance the piece leaving the viewer confused. Turner, who was intensely interested in poetry all his life, seems to have found in Thomson the verbalization of what he wanted to do on canvas or watercolor paper. Turner made the objects of nature as a medium of the atmosphere through which the light filters the outlines and colors of objects that are altered before they reach the human mind. In Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino, the view of Rome from the Capitoline Hill shimmers due to how he captured the light through the painting. In Long Ship’s Lighthouse, Land Ends shows a combination of light and dark being equal. Though he considered the efficacy of light to be greater than that of darkness, Turner seems to have believed that as principles, both light and darkness are equally powerful. He added highlights to enhance the texture and atmosphere and the washes to reveal the white of the paper in the lighthouse with all the techniques that he used the painting became a modern