Angel in the Sun: Turner's Vision of History

Front Cover
McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1999 M03 10 - 280 pages
Turner was deeply affected by the world in which he lived, the sciences that explained it, and the conflicts and accomplishments of his society. He wove these strands into the dense fabric of the historical pictures he created, pictures that were extremely varied, complex, original, and controversial. In Angel in the Sun Gerald Finley untangles the various thematic strands running through Turner's art, including the intersection of private and public histories, classical and biblical history and contemporary events, and science and religion, and shows how Turner's use of light and colour played an important role in conveying these ideas. Angel in the Sun includes over 130 illustrations in colour and black and white that reveal Turner's remarkable achievement as a painter of historical subjects. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, the book will appeal not only to art historians and landscape theorists but also to historians of science and literature.

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Contents

A Brief Introduction
3
2 The Louvre and the Royal Academy Lectures
6
3 Greece and Italy
19
4 The Dynamics of Myth and Legend
46
5 Rural Retreats
83
Commemorating the Past and Present
94
7 Let my words Out live the maker
114
Bane or Benefit?
129
Fall to Apocalypse
174
Theory and Practice
187
Shade and Darkness and Light and Colour the Late Deluge Pictures
200
EPILOGUE
209
Daniel Wilson and Regulus
211
NOTES
215
SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
238
INDEX
245

Astronomy and Geology
148

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Page 104 - Last noon beheld them full of lusty life, Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay, The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife, The morn the marshalling in arms — the day Battle's magnificently stern array...
Page 36 - I STOOD in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, A palace and a prison on each hand ; I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand : A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles O'er the far times, when many a subject land Look'd to the winged Lion's marble piles, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles...
Page 85 - Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen Full many a sprightly race Disporting on thy margent green The paths of pleasure trace; Who foremost now delight to cleave With pliant arm, thy glassy wave?
Page 175 - And sullen Moloch, fled, Hath left in shadows dread His burning idol all of blackest hue; In vain with cymbals' ring They call the grisly king, In dismal dance about the furnace blue; The brutish gods of Nile as fast, Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis, haste.
Page 220 - So saying, her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluck'd, she eat: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, That all was lost.
Page 175 - The oracles are dumb ; No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving ; Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving ; No nightly trance, or breathed spell, Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.
Page 40 - There is the moral of all human tales ; « 'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, First Freedom, and then Glory — when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption, — barbarism at last And History, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page...
Page 14 - But yonder comes the powerful King of Day, Rejoicing in the east. The lessening cloud, The kindling azure, and the mountain's brow> Illumed with fluid gold, his near approach Betoken glad.
Page 129 - Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag, Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer from the crag; Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree — Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea.
Page 20 - Fair Greece ! sad relic of departed worth ! Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great! Who now shall lead thy scatter'd children forth, And long accustom'd bondage uncreate? Not such thy sons who whilome did await, The hopeless warriors of a willing doom, In bleak Thermopylae's sepulchral strait— Oh ! who that gallant spirit shall resume, Leap from Eurotas' banks, and call thee from the tomb?

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