Recent Events

Annual General Meeting followed by ‘Turner in the Auction House’, a talk by Harriet Drummond, Senior Director and Head of Department, British Art on Paper, at Christie’s.

Lecture by James Hamilton. Antagonisms between Turner and Constable have been much manufactured and recorded across the decades with various admixtures of glee and admonition. This lecture will reveal something of the complexities of friendship between these two giants of nineteenth-century painting in their pursuit of a common purpose.

Led by Turner Society committee member Ian Guy. From his first visit to Margate as a boy to his last years, Turner often returned to Margate and the nearby coast. To walk along the pier and follow the coastal road along the cliff tops is to share sights that inspired him. Walkers may like to make their own, independent, visits to the old town and Turner Contemporary in the morning, before we assemble. The coastal walk to Broadstairs is approximately six miles, so this is an outing for serious walkers. The return will be by train from Broadstairs to Margate Railway Station.

The 42nd Kurt Pantzer Memorial Lecture by Timothy Wilcox. Throughout his career, from his first visits to Turner’s Gallery in 1804 to his dazzling reflections of the England and Wales series in the 1830s, Cotman mapped his own artistic course onto Turner’s own. The unequal dialogue tells us a little, perhaps, about Turner’s celebrity and a lot about Cotman’s struggles. According to Harold Bloom, influence causes anxiety; according to Cotman, anxiety causes influence.

Lecture by Dr Joyce Townsend. In his early life Turner worked in watercolour before he used oil, employing a whole repertoire of techniques to create lights in his compositions. This experience greatly influenced his methods when painting in oil. All his life he exploited newly invented pigments and innovative ways of marketing his works and his output was prodigious. This talk illustrates the considerable range of painting materials he used and how he used them, from his early watercolours to his well-known habit in later life of finishing his oils on the walls of the Royal Academy just before the annual exhibition.

The AGM will take place via Zoom on Saturday 4 December at 2.30 p.m. Log-in details will be sent to members nearer the time.

Including ‘Turner and Peter-boats’, a short talk by our Chairman, Pieter van der Merwe

Turner Society members are invited to visit recently restored Pitzhanger Manor, Sir John Soane’s country house at Ealing. At 2.45 p.m., outside the entrance to the house, Catherine Parry-Wingfield will give a short talk on Soane and Turner, who was a frequent visitor there. The two men were great friends, and Sandycombe Lodge in Twickenham, which Turner designed himself, has many Soanian features.

The 41st Kurt Pantzer Memorial Lecture by Professor Stephen Bann. This lecture will examine diverse series from the Southern Coast (1816–24) to the Rivers of France in the mid-1830s, and will argue that Turner’s engagement in the production of such serial publications also helped to provide him with a specific sense of mission which was ultimately fulfilled in some of his major artistic achievements.

The Annual General Meeting of the Turner Society will take the form of an online meeting.

The visit to the ‘Turner’s Modern World’ exhibition will be replaced by an online talk by the curators together with a question and answer session, arranged specially for the Society on the date of the cancelled visit.