J. M. W. Turner
Self portrait, oil on canvas, circa 1799
Birth name	Joseph Mallord William Turner
Born	(1775-04-23)23 April 1775 Covent Garden, London, England
Died	19 December 1851(1851-12-19) (aged 76) Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London, England
Nationality	English
Field	Painting
Training	Royal Academy of Art
Movement	Romanticism

Joseph Mallord William Turner RA (23 April 1775 – 19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivaling history painting.^[1] Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolour landscape painting. He is commonly known as "the painter of light"^[2] and his work is regarded as a Romantic preface to Impressionism.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on or around the 23 April 1775^[a] in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, England.^[3] His father, William Turner (1738–7 August 1829), was a barber and wig maker,^[4] His mother, Mary Marshall, came from a family of butchers.^[5] A younger sister, Mary Ann Turner, was born in September 1778 but died aged four in August 1783.^[6]

Drawing of St John's Church, Margate by Turner from around 1786, when he would have been 11 or 12 years old. The ambitious but unsure drawing shows an early struggle with perspective, that can be contrasted with his later work

A View of the Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth – this watercolour was Turner's first to be accepted for the Royal Academy's annual exhibition in April 1790, the month he turned fifteen. The image is a technical presentation of Turner's strong grasp of the elements of perspective with several buildings at sharp angles to each other, demonstrating Turner's thorough mastery of Thomas Malton's topographical style.^[7]

Fishermen at Sea exhibited in 1796 was the first oil painting exhibited by Turner at the Royal Academy

In 1785, as a result of a "fit of illness" in the family^[b][5] the young Turner was sent to stay with his maternal uncle, Joseph Mallord William Marshall, in Brentford, which was then a small town west of London on the banks of the River Thames. From this period, the earliest known artistic exercise by Turner is found, a series of simple colourings of engraved plates from Henry Boswell's Picturesque View of the Antiquities of England and Wales.^[8] Around 1786, Turner was sent to Margate on the north-east Kent coast. Here Turner produced a series of early drawings of the town and surrounding area foreshadowing his later work. Turner would return to Margate many times in later life.^[9] By this time, Turner's drawings were already being exhibited in his father's shop window and sold for a few shillings each.^[5] His father boasted to the artist Thomas Stothard that: "My son, sir, is going to be a painter".^[10] In 1789 Turner again stayed with his uncle, who by this time had retired to Sunningwell in Oxford. A whole sketchbook of work from his time in Oxford survives, as well as an early watercolour of Oxford. The use of pencil sketches on location as a basis for later finished paintings would form the basis of Turner's essential working style for his whole career.^[8]

Many of the early sketches by Turner were studies of Architecture and/or exercises in perspective and it is known that the young Turner worked for several architects including Thomas Hardwick (junior), James Wyatt and Bonomi the Elder.^[11] By the end of 1789 he had also begun to study under the topographical draughtsman Thomas Malton, whom Turner would later call "My real master".^[12] He entered the Royal Academy of Art schools in 1789, when he was only 14 years old,^[13] and was accepted into the academy a year later. Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy, chaired the panel that admitted him. At first Turner showed a keen interest in architecture but was advised to continue painting by the architect Thomas Hardwick (junior). His first watercolour A View of the Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth was accepted for the Summer Exhibition of 1790 when Turner was only 15.

As a probationer in the Academy, he was taught drawing (not painting) from plaster casts of antique sculptures and his name appears in the registry of the Academy over a hundred times from July 1790 to October 1793.^[14] In June 1792 he was admitted to the life class to learn to draw the human body from nude models.^[15] Turner continued to exhibit watercolours each year at the Academy – travelling in the summer and painting in the winter. He travelled widely throughout Britain, particularly to Wales, and produced a wide range of sketches for working up into studies and watercolours. These particularly focused on architectural work, which utilised his skills as a draughtsman.^[14] In 1793, he showed a watercolour with the title The Rising Squall – Hot Wells from St Vincent's Rock Bristol (now lost) that foreshadowed his later climatic effects.^[7] Cunningham in his obituary of Turner wrote that it was: "recognised by the wiser few as a nobel attempt at lift in landscape art out of the tame insipidities...[and] evinced for the fist time that mastery of effect for which he is now justly celebrated."^[16]

Turner exhibited his first oil painting at the Academy in 1796, Fishermen at Sea. A nocturnal moonlit scene, the image of boats in peril contrasts the cold light of the moon with the firelight glow of the fishermen's lantern.^[17] Wilton has said that the image: "Is a summary of all that had been said about the sea by the artists of the eighteenth century."^[18] and shows strong influenced by artists such as Horace Vernet Philip James de Loutherbourg and Willem van de Velde the Younger. The image was praised by contemporary critics and would found Turner's reputation, both as an oil painter and as a painter of maritime scenes.^[19]

Early career[link]

Turner travelled widely in Europe, starting with France and Switzerland in 1802 and studying in the Louvre in Paris in the same year. He also made many visits to Venice. On a visit to Lyme Regis, in Dorset, England, he painted a stormy scene (now in the Cincinnati Art Museum).

Important support for his work also came from Walter Ramsden Fawkes, of Farnley Hall, near Otley in Yorkshire, who became a close friend of the artist. Turner first visited Otley in 1797, aged 22, when commissioned to paint watercolours of the area. He was so attracted to Otley and the surrounding area that he returned to it throughout his career. The stormy backdrop of Hannibal Crossing The Alps is reputed to have been inspired by a storm over Otley's Chevin while Turner was staying at Farnley Hall.

Turner was also a frequent guest of George O'Brien Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont at Petworth House in West Sussex and painted scenes that Egremont funded taken from the grounds of the house and of the Sussex countryside, including a view of the Chichester Canal. Petworth House still displays a number of paintings.

Personal life[link]

As he grew older, Turner became more eccentric. He had few close friends except for his father, who lived with him for 30 years, eventually working as his studio assistant. His father's death in 1829 had a profound effect on him, and thereafter he was subject to bouts of depression. He never married but had a relationship with an older widow, Sarah Danby. He is believed to have been the father of her two daughters born in 1801 and 1811.^[20]

Death[link]

He died in the house of his mistress Sophia Caroline Booth in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea on 19 December 1851. He is said to have uttered the last words "The sun is God" before expiring.^[21] At his request he was buried in St Paul's Cathedral, where he lies next to Sir Joshua Reynolds. His last exhibition at the Royal Academy was in 1850.

The architect Philip Hardwick (1792–1870) who was a friend of Turner's and also the son of the artist's tutor, Thomas Hardwick, was in charge of making his funeral arrangements and wrote to those who knew Turner to tell them at the time of his death that, "I must inform you, we have lost him." Other active executors were his cousin and executor, and chief mourner at the funeral, Henry Harpur IV (benefactor of Westminster – now Chelsea & Westminster – Hospital), Revd. Henry Scott Trimmer, George Jones RA and Charles Turner ARA.

Art[link]

Joseph Mallord William Turner – Dutch Boats in a Gale (1801)

Willem van de Velde the Younger, Ships on a Stormy Sea (c. 1672)

Turner's painting Dutch Boats in a Gale (the Bridgewater Sea Piece) was painted as a pendant to this painting by Willem van de Velde for the Duke of Bridgewater.

Style[link]

Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. According to David Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." (Piper 321)

Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires (such as the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner rushed to witness first-hand, and which he transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn after the Wreck (1840) and The Slave Ship (1840).

Turner's major venture into printmaking was the Liber Studiorum (Book of Studies), a set of seventy prints that the artist worked on from 1806 to 1819. The Liber Studiorum was an expression of his intentions for landscape art. Loosely based on Claude Lorrain's Liber Veritatis (Book of Truth), the plates were meant to be widely disseminated, and categorised the genre into six types: Marine, Mountainous, Pastoral, Historical, Architectural, and Elevated or Epic Pastoral.^[22] His printmaking was a major part of his output, and a whole museum is devoted to it, the Turner Museum in Sarasota, Florida, founded in 1974 by Douglass Montrose-Graem to house his collection of Turner prints.^[23]

Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God–a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena.

Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway painted (1844)

His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape. However, in Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects.^[24]

One popular story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality, states that he even had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea.^[25]

In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.

Chichester Canal's vivid colours may have been influenced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815.

High levels of ash in the atmosphere during 1816 the "Year Without a Summer", led to unusually spectacular sunsets during this period, and were an inspiration for some of Turner's work.

John Ruskin says in his "Notes" on Turner in March 1878, that an early patron, Dr Thomas Monro, the Principal Physician of Bedlam, was a significant influence on Turner's style:

His true master was Dr Monro; to the practical teaching of that first patron and the wise simplicity of method of watercolour study, in which he was disciplined by him and companioned by Giston, the healthy and constant development of the greater power is primarily to be attributed; the greatness of the power itself, it is impossible to over-estimate.

On one of his trips to Europe, circa 1820, he met the Irish physician Robert James Graves. Graves was travelling in a Diligence in the Alps when a man who looked like the mate of a ship got in, sat beside him, and soon took from his pocket a note-book across which his hand from time to time passed with the rapidity of lightning. Graves wondered if the man was insane, he looked, saw that the stranger had been noting the forms of clouds as they passed and that he was no common artist. The two travelled and sketched together for months. Graves tells that Turner would outline a scene, sit doing nothing for two or three days, then suddenly, "perhaps on the third day, he would exclaim 'there it is', and seizing his colours work rapidly till he had noted down the peculiar effect he wished to fix in his memory."

Wreckers Coast of Northumberland, painted ca. 1836. Yale Center for British Art

An engraving of a sketch by Turner depicting Brougham Castle. The sketch, made during a visit to the castle in 1809, provided the starting point for a later watercolour.

The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1839

The shipwreck of the Minotaur, oil on canvas

J.M.W. Turner, Calais Pier

The first American to buy a Turner painting was James Lenox of New York City, a private collector. Lenox wished to own a Turner and in 1845 bought one unseen through an intermediary, his friend C. R. Leslie. From among the paintings Turner had on hand and was willing to sell for £500, Leslie selected and shipped the 1832 atmospheric seascape Staffa, Fingal's Cave.^[26] Worried about the painting's reception by Lenox, who knew Turner's work only through his etchings, Leslie wrote Lenox that the quality of Staffa, "a most poetic picture of a steam boat" would become apparent in time. Upon receiving the painting Lenox was baffled, and "greatly disappointed" by what he called the painting's "indistinctness". When Leslie was forced to relay this opinion to Turner, Turner said "You should tell Mr. Lenox that indistinctness is my forte." Staffa, Fingal's Cave is currently owned by the Yale Center for British Art.

Legacy[link]

Turner left a small fortune which he hoped would be used to support what he called "decayed artists". He planned and designed an almshouse for them at Twickenham with a gallery for some of his works. His will was contested and in 1856, after a court battle, part of his fortune was awarded to his first cousins including Thomas Price Turner.^[27] Another portion of the money went to the Royal Academy of Arts, which occasionally awards students the Turner Medal. His collection of finished paintings was bequeathed to the British nation, and he intended that a special gallery would be built to house them. This did not come to pass owing to a failure to agree on a site, and then to the parsimony of British governments. Twenty-two years after his death, the British Parliament passed an Act allowing his paintings to be lent to museums outside London, and so began the process of scattering the pictures which Turner had wanted to be kept together. In 1910 the main part of the Turner Bequest, which includes unfinished paintings and drawings, was rehoused in the Duveen Turner Wing at the Tate Gallery. In 1987 a new wing of the Tate, the Clore Gallery, was opened specifically to house the Turner bequest, though some of the most important paintings in it remain in the National Gallery in contravention of Turner's condition that the finished pictures be kept and shown together. Increasingly paintings are lent abroad, ignoring Turner's provision that they be kept "constantly" in Turner's Gallery. After the Turner content was diminished and diluted in the Clore Gallery from c. 2002, in 2010–12 only two of the nine rooms on the main floor were devoted to Turner. The claim that the Tate was fulfilling Turner's wishes was dropped in 1995, when the Charity Commission said that the Turner Bequest had been free of Turner's conditions. This was challenged by Leolin Price QC.

A commemorative stained glass window was added to St. Mary's Church, Battersea between 1976 and 1982.^[28] There are statues representing him at St Paul's Cathedral, Victoria & Albert Museum, Royal Academy of Arts and Victoria & Albert Museum. A portrait drawing by Cornelius Varley with his patent graphic telescope (Sheffield Museums & Galleries) was compared with his death mask (National Portrait Gallery, London) by Kelly Freeman at Dundee University 2009–10 to ascertain whether it really depicts Turner (www.faceofturner.com).

The Turner Society was founded by Selby Whittingham at London and Manchester in 1975. After that endorsed the Tate Gallery's Clore Gallery wing as the solution (on the lines of the Duveen wing of 1910), to the controversy of what should be done with the Turner Bequest, Selby Whittingham resigned from that and founded the Independent Turner Society.

A prestigious annual art award, the Turner Prize, created in 1984, was named in Turner's honour, and twenty years later the Winsor & Newton Turner Watercolour Award was founded.

A major exhibition, "Turner's Britain", with material (including The Fighting Temeraire) on loan from around the globe, was held at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery from 7 November 2003 to 8 February 2004.

In 2005, Turner's The Fighting Temeraire was voted Britain's "greatest painting" in a public poll organised by the BBC.^[29]

Turner's Ovid Banished From Rome, 1838

In October 2005 Professor Harold V. Livermore (1914–2010), its owner for 60 years, gave Sandycombe Lodge, the villa at Twickenham which Turner designed and built for himself, to the Sandycombe Lodge Trust to be preserved as a monument to the artist. In 2006 he additionally gave some land to the Trust which had been part of Turner's domaine. The organisation The Friends of Turner's House was formed in 2004 to support it.

In April 2006, Christie's New York auctioned Giudecca, La Donna Della Salute and San Giorgio, a view of Venice exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1841, for US$35.8 million, setting a new record for a Turner. The New York Times stated that according to two sources who had requested anonymity the buyer was casino magnate Stephen Wynn.

In 2006, Turner's Glaucus and Scylla (1840) was returned by Kimbell Art Museum to the heirs of John and Anna Jaffe after a Holocaust Claim was made.^[30] The painting was repurchased by the Kimbell for $5.7 million at a sale by Christie's in April 2007.^[31][32]

Between 1 October 2007 and 21 September 2008, the first major exhibit of Turner's works in the United States in over forty years came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Dallas Museum of Art. It included over 140 paintings, more than half of which were from the Tate.

An art gallery known as the Turner Contemporary has been built in Margate to celebrate the association of the artist with the town.^[33]

The "Turner and his painters" exhibition (Tate Britain, London, 23 September 2009 to 31 January 2010, Paris, Grand Palais, 22 February to 24 May 2010) retraces and illustrates the development of Turner's very personal vision, through the many chance or deliberate, but always opportune and enriching interaction that influenced his remarkable career. Nearly 100 paintings and other graphic works (studies and engravings) from major British and American collections, as well as the Louvre and the Prado will be on show.^[34]

On July 7, 2010, Turner's final painting of Rome, Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino, from 1839, was bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum at a Sotheby’s auction in London for $44.9 million. In January 2011 The Painter, a biographical play on his life by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, premiered at the Arcola Theatre in London.

Selected works[link]

Turner was an extremely prolific artist who produced over 550 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolours, 30,000 paper works.^[35] The Tate Gallery in London produces the most comprehensive and up to date catalogue of Turner works in held by both public and private collections worldwide.

• 1796–Fisherman at Sea, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 1/8 in., Tate Gallery, London
• 1806–The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory, oil on canvas–Tate Gallery, London
• 1809–The Trout Stream, oil on canvas, Taft Museum, Cincinnati
• 1812–Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London
• 1817–Eruption of Vesuvius, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT
• 1817–Raby Castle, the Seat of the Earl of Darlington, oil on canvas, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
• 1822–The Battle of Trafalgar, oil on canvas, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
• 1829–Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London
• 1834–Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington
• 1835–The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
• 1835–The Grand Canal, Venice, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• 1838–The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken up, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London
• 1840–Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• 1843–The Evening of the Deluge, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington
• 1844–Approach to Venice, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington
• 1844–Rain, Steam and Speed–The Great Western Railway, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London
• c.1840-1850–Europa and the Bull, oil on canvas, Taft Museum, Cincinnati

See also[link]

• British art
• Cloudscape (art)
• History of painting
• List of British painters
• Theory of Colours
• Western painting

Notes[link]

a. ^{^} Turner was born some time in late April or early May 1775, the exact date of Turner's birth is unknown. The date of the 23rd of April, which is both St George's Day and the birthday of William Shakespeare, was the date Turner himself claimed to have been born, but this claim has never been verified.^[3] The first verifiable date is that Turner was baptised on May 14. This casts some doubt on the April 23rd date, as high infant mortality rates meant parents would usually baptise their children shortly after birth.^[36]

b.^{^} Mary Marshall died in 1804, after having been committed in 1799 to St Luke's Hospital and then to the Bethlem Royal Hospital, a mental asylum. Her illness possibly due in part to the early death of Turner's younger sister. Hamilton suggests that this "fit of illness" may have been an early sign of her madness.

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Bailey, Anthony (1998). Standing in the sun : a life of J.M.W. Turner. London: Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6604-4. 
• Hamilton, James (2007). Turner. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-8129-6791-3. 
• A.J.Finberg, The Life of J.M.W.Turner, R.A. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939 and 1961)
• Selby Whittingham. An Historical Account of the Will of J.M.W.Turner, R.A. (J.M.W.Turner, R.A., Publications, London, 1993-6)
• Colin Harrison, Turner's Oxford (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2000)
• Stanley Warburton, Discovering Turner's Lakeland (Lytham St Annes, 2008)
• David Hill, Turner and Leeds: Image of Industry (Jeremy Mills Publishing, 2008)
• Bockemühl, Michael (2006). J.M.W. Turner, 1775–1851 : the world of light and colour ([2nd ed.] ed.). Köln: Taschen. ISBN 3-8228-6325-4. 
• Wilton, Andrew (2006). Turner in his time (Revised ed.). London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-23830-1. 

Further reading[link]

• Joll, ed. by Evelyn; Butlin, Martin, Herrmann, Luke (2001). The Oxford companion to J. M. W. Turner. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. ISBN 0-19-860025-9. 
• Barker, Elizabeth E. "Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)". Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/trnr/hd_trnr.htm. 
• Ackroyd, Peter (2005). J.M.W. Turner (Ackroyd's Brief Lives) (1st ed. ed.). New York: Nan A. Talese. ISBN 0-385-50798-4. 
• Venning, Barry (2003). Turner (1st publ. ed.). Berlin: Phaidon Verlag GmbH. ISBN 0-7148-3988-4. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: J. M. W. Turner

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Turner, Joseph Mallord William.

•  "Turner, Joseph Mallord William". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920. 
• The Turner Society
• Katharina Fritsch, The Artist and the Emperor, Tate etc., Spring 2007
• Christie's Videos – Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio Joseph Mallord William Turner,RA
• Sotheby's Videos – The Temple Of Jupiter Panellenius Joseph Mallord William Turner,RA
• Sotheby's Videos – Modern Rome Campo Vaccino and The condition of Modern Rome, Campo Vaccino J. M. W. Turner, RA
• Web site of the Tate Turner Collection, includes the "Turner Bequest" of over 300 Oil paintings and over 30,000 sketches. The catalogue holds records of over 40,000 works by turner

William Turner Logan (June 21, 1874 - September 15, 1941) was a U.S. Representative from South Carolina.

Born in Summerville, South Carolina, Logan attended the public schools, and was graduated from the College of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1895. He studied law at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. He was admitted to the bar in 1895 and commenced practice in Charleston, South Carolina. He served as member of the State house of representatives 1901-1904. Corporation counsel of Charleston 1914-1918. He served as chairman of the Democratic executive committee of Charleston County 1916-1918. He served as chairman of the city Democratic executive committee 1918-1922 and reelected in 1922.

Logan was elected as a Democrat to the Sixty-seventh and Sixty-eighth Congresses (March 4, 1921-March 3, 1925). He was an unsuccessful candidate for renomination in 1924. He continued the practice of his profession in Charleston, South Carolina, until his death in that city on September 15, 1941. He was interred in Magnolia Cemetery.

Source[link]

• W. Turner Logan at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress

Simon Schama
Born	(1945-02-13) 13 February 1945 (age 67) London
Nationality	British
Institutions	Columbia University
Alma mater	Christ's College, Cambridge

Simon Michael Schama, CBE (born 13 February 1945) is a British historian and art historian. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University.^[1] He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain. Other works on history and art include The Embarrassment of Riches, Landscape and Memory, Dead Certainties, Rembrandt's Eyes,^[2] and his history of the French Revolution, Citizens.^[1] Schama is an art and cultural critic for The New Yorker.^[1]

Life and early career[link]

The son of Jewish parents with roots in Lithuania, Romania, and Turkey, Schama was born in London.^[1][3] In the mid-1940s, the family moved to Southend-on-Sea in Essex before moving back to London. Schama writes of this period in the Introduction to Landscape & Memory (pp. 3–4)

I had no hill [the previous paragraph had talked of his enthusiasm for Puck of Pook's Hill], but I did have the Thames. It was not the upstream river that the poets in my Palgrave claimed burbled betwixt mossy banks. ... It was the low, gull-swept estuary, the marriage bed of salt and fresh water, stretching as far as I could see from my northern Essex bank, toward a thin black horizon on the other side. That would be Kent, the sinister enemy who always seemed to beat us in the County Cricket Championship. ...

In 1956 Schama won a scholarship to the independent Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School in Cricklewood, (from 1961 Elstree, Herts.), followed by Christ's College, Cambridge, reading history under J. H. Plumb and graduating with a Starred First in 1966.^[1]

He worked for short periods as a lecturer in history at Cambridge, where he became a Fellow and Director of Studies in History, and at Oxford, where he was made a Fellow of Brasenose College in 1976, specialising in the French Revolution.^[1] At this time, Schama wrote his first book, Patriots and Liberators, which won the Wolfson History Prize. The book was originally intended as a study of the French Revolution, but as published in 1977, it focused on the effect of the Patriot revolution in The Netherlands, and its aftermath.

His second book, Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1978), is a study of the Zionist aims of Edmond James de Rothschild and James Armand de Rothschild.

He is married to Ginny Papaioannou, a geneticist from California; they have two children.^[4]

In the United States[link]

In 1980 Schama took up a chair at Harvard University. His next book, The Embarrassment of Riches (1987), again focused on Dutch history.^[5] In it, Schama interpreted the ambivalences that informed the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century, held in balance between the conflicting imperatives, to live richly and with power, or to live a godly life. The iconographic evidence that Schama draws upon, in 317 illustrations, of emblems and propaganda that defined Dutch character, prefigured his expansion in the 1990s as a commentator on art and visual culture.^[6]

Citizens (1989), written at speed to a publisher's commission, finally saw the publication of his long-awaited study of the French revolution, and won the 1990 NCR Book Award. Citizens was very well received and sold admirably. Its view that the violence of the Terror was inherent from the start of the Revolution, however, has received serious criticism.^[1][7]

In 1991, he published Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations),^[8] a relatively slender work of unusual structure and point-of-view in that it looked at two widely reported deaths a hundred years apart, that of General James Wolfe – and the famous painting by Benjamin West – and that of (by murder) George Parkman, uncle of the better known Francis Parkman. Schama mooted some possible (invented) connections between the two cases, exploring the historian's inability "ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing the documentation," and speculatively bridging "the teasing gap separating a lived event and its subsequent narration." Not all readers absorbed the nuance of the title: it received a greatly mixed critical and academic reception. Traditional historians in particular denounced Schama's integration of fact and conjecture to produce a seamless narrative^[9] but later assessments took a more relaxed view of the experiment.^[10] It was an approach soon taken up by such historical writers as Peter Ackroyd, David Taylor and Richard Holmes.^[11] Sales in hardback exceeded Schama's earlier works.^[12]

Schama at Strand Bookstore, New York City

Schama's Landscape and Memory (1995) focused on the relationship between physical environment and folk memory, separating the components of landscape as wood, water and rock, enmeshed in the cultural consciousness of collective "memory" that are embodied in myths, which Schama finds to be expressed outwardly in ceremony and text. While in many ways even more personal and idiosyncratic than Dead Certainties, roaming through widening circles of digressions, this book was also more traditionally structured and better-defined in its approach. While many reviews remained decidedly mixed, the book was a definite commercial success and won numerous prizes.^[13]

Appropriately, many of the plaudits came from the art world rather than from traditional academia. This was borne out when Schama became art critic for The New Yorker in 1995. He held the position for three years, dovetailing his regular column with professorial duties at Columbia University; a selection of his best essays on art for the magazine, chosen by Schama himself, was published in 2005 under the title Hang Ups. During this time, Schama also produced a lavishly illustrated Rembrandt's Eyes, another critical and commercial success. Despite the book's title, it contrasts the biographies of Rembrandt van Rijn and Peter Paul Rubens.

BBC[link]

In 1995 Schama wrote and presented a series called Landscape and Memory to accompany his book of the same name.

The year 2000 saw Schama return to the UK, having been commissioned by the BBC to produce a series of television documentary programmes on British history as part of their Millennium celebrations, under the title A History of Britain. Schama wrote and presented the episodes himself, in a friendly and often jocular style with his highly characteristic delivery, and was rewarded with excellent reviews and unexpectedly high ratings. There has been, however, some irritation and criticism expressed by a group of historians about Schama's condensed recounting of the British Isles' history on this occasion, particularly by those specialising in the pre-Anglo-Saxon history of insular Celtic civilisation.^[14] The series was eventually expanded to three, with 15 episodes^[15][16] produced in total covering the complete span of British history up until 1965;^[16] it went on to become one of the BBC's best-selling documentary series on DVD. Schama also wrote a trilogy of tie-in books for the show, which took the story up to the year 2000; there is some debate as to whether the books are the tie-in product for the TV series, or the other way around. The series also had some popularity in the United States when it was first shown on the History Channel.^[16]

In 2001 Schama received a CBE. In 2003 he signed a lucrative new contract with the BBC and HarperCollins to produce three new books and two accompanying TV series. Worth £3 million (around US$5.3m), it represents the biggest advance deal ever for a TV historian. The first result of the deal was a book and TV show entitled Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution, dealing in particular with the proclamation issued during the Revolutionary War by Lord Dunmore offering slaves from rebel plantations freedom in return for service to the crown.

In 2006 the BBC broadcast a new TV series, Simon Schama's Power of Art which, with an accompanying book, was presented and written by Schama. It marks a return to art history for him, treating eight artists through eight key works: Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath, Bernini's Ecstasy of St Theresa, Rembrandt's Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, Jacques-Louis David's The Death Of Marat, J. M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship, Vincent van Gogh's Wheat Field with Crows, Picasso's Guernica, and Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals.^[17] It was also shown on PBS in the United States.^[18]

In October 2008 BBC broadcast a four-part television series called The American Future: A History presented and written by Schama. In March 2009, Schama presented a BBC Radio 4 show entitled 'Baseball and Me', both exploring the history of the game and describing his own personal support of the Boston Red Sox.

In 2010, Schama presented a series of ten talks for the BBC Radio 4 series A Point of View:

• Why We Like Tough Guys in Politics: When times are hard people seem to prefer tough leaders.
• Singing in the Rain: Schama looks forward to spring with personal reflections on the changing seasons.
• At the Heart of the Matter: The politics surrounding President Barack Obama's healthcare reforms.
• The Gift of the Gab: The history of political rhetoric and the power during election campaigns of televised debates.
• Behold, Newstralia!: Celebrates the distinctive history and culture of New Zealand and regrets any renewed talk of joining forces with Australia.
• A Welcome Slice of American Pie: Reflection on the quality of American food and eating habits.
• The Drama of Politics: The timeless drama of British politics.
• When Money is Just an Illusion: Reflection on the meaning of money as represented by coins and notes and in art.
• Hearts of Oak: Reflection on the significance of one of the sights that will greet new MPs in the chamber of the House of Commons - the panelling made of solid oak.
• Britain's New Politics: Reflection on the 2010 United Kingdom General Election, favourably comparing the British system for a swift handover of power to the cumbersome American one.

Politics[link]

Schama is a supporter of the Labour Party, donating £2,000 to Oona King's bid to become Labour's candidate for the 2012 London Mayoral election.^[19]

Israel[link]

Schama was critical of a call by British novelist John Berger for an academic boycott of Israel over its policies towards the Palestinians. Writing in The Guardian in an article co-authored with lawyer Anthony Julius, Schama compared Berger's academic boycott to policies adopted by Nazi Germany, noting "This is not the first boycott call directed at Jews. On 1 April 1933, a week after he came to power, Hitler ordered a boycott of Jewish shops, banks, offices and department stores."^[20]

In 2006 on the BBC, Schama debated with Vivienne Westwood the morality of Israel's actions in the Israel-Lebanon war.^[21] He characterised Israel's bombing of Lebanese city centres as unhelpful in Israel's attempt to "get rid of" Hezbollah.^[21] With regard to the bombing he said: "Of course the spectacle and suffering makes us grieve. Who wouldn't grieve? But it's not enough to do that. We've got to understand. You've even got to understand Israel's point of view."^[21]

United States[link]

Schama is a vocal supporter of President Barack Obama^[22] and critic of George W. Bush.^[23] He appeared on the BBC's coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, clashing with John Bolton.^[24]

Writing style[link]

Schama has a literary way of writing that is attractive to both historians and a wider readership. It is "packed with evocative detail: rich fruit cakes crammed with raisins, currants, nuts and glacé cherries all mulled in brandy sauce".^[1] He has also received criticism for dumbing down history, presenting a "grossly oversimplified and mythologising view of the history of nations" and not fostering critical thinking.^[25]

Criticism[link]

Susan Buck-Morss criticizes Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age for its "selective national history" of the Dutch Republic, "that omits much or all of the colonizing story."^[26] "One would have no idea that Dutch hegemony in the slave trade (replacing Spain and Portugal as major players) contributed substantially to the enormous 'overload' of wealth that he describes as becoming so socially and morally problematic during the century of Dutch 'centrality' to the 'commerce of the world.'"^[27]

Publications[link]

Books

• Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780–1813 (1977)
• Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1978)
• The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987)
• Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989)^[1]
• Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (1991)
• Landscape and Memory (1995)^[2][13]
• Rembrandt's Eyes (1999)^[2]
• A History of Britain Vol. I (2000, ISBN 0-563-48714-3)
• A History of Britain Vol. II (2001, ISBN 0-563-48718-6)
• A History of Britain Vol. III (2002, ISBN 0-563-48719-4)
• Hang Ups: Essays on Art (2005)
• Rough Crossings (2005, ISBN 0-06-053916-X)
• Simon Schama's Power of Art (2006, ISBN 0-06-117610-9)^[18]
• The American Future: A History (2009, ISBN 0-06-053923-2)
• Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writing on Politics, Ice Cream, Churchill and My Mother