Vision for the OrdinaryWe look today at Joseph Turner who, through his art, inspired F W Boreham to write about ordinary, everyday scenes and experiences.
Painting Things as they are
In an editorial entitled, ‘Things as they are’, Boreham stated that the landscape painter, Joseph Turner (1775-1851), “did for art what Dickens did for literature. He threw a lustre about the mediocre and the ordinary”.[1] Not only did Turner insist on painting things as they appeared but he exhibited a fascination in looking for beauty in the most unexpected places.
Always attentive to human response, Boreham said, “As if by magic, many eyes were opened. People recognised that there is a wealth of comeliness lurking in sordid and mundane objects that had hitherto appeared to them so utterly prosaic and almost disgustingly commonplace”.[2] Boreham contended that when people respond to art that has a “fidelity to reality”,[3] as in Turner’s paintings, it leads them to a new way of looking at their world. Writing of this service of art to people, Boreham continued: “By means of such paintings art provides windows through which any man may gaze into infinity. Art renders us her most valuable service when she teaches us to see marble where, until then, we had only seen mud .… From that moment the world becomes transfigured. Having discovered loveliness in one commonplace setting, we look for it in every setting”.[4]
Hungry Eyes
In his editorials about Turner, Boreham referred to the domino effect in which the viewing of beautiful paintings sets one looking for loveliness in the world that, in turn, makes “the eye become hungry with expectancy”.[5] Boreham wrote that a further consequence of this process was the cultivation of an eye for beauty.
Richard Jeffries hinted at the potential to train the eye when saying, “If a man carries a sense of beauty in his eye, he will find beauty in things as they really are”.[6] Urging this development of vision in his readers, Boreham said, “The eye becomes a realm of fascination. And, since we are living in a world in which we see pretty much what we have eyes to see, we henceforth find scintillations of beauty breaking from every crack and cranny”.[7]
Furthermore, Boreham believed a person could only claim to have an eye for beauty in ordinary things, when: “In donning his hat and coat on a day of fog and slush and drizzle, he beholds, in the outlook framed by his own doorway, a picture that, portrayed upon canvas, would constitute itself a masterpiece …. The man who cannot find Fairyland beside his own doorstep will never find the fairies anywhere”.[8]
Geoff Pound
Image: Joseph Turner's Frosty Morning set in Yorkshire.
[1] F W Boreham, Mercury, 12 September 1931; Age, 14 September 1946.
[2] Boreham, Mercury, 12 September 1931; Age, 14 September 1946.
[3] Boreham, Mercury, 12 September 1931; Age, 14 September 1946.
[4] Boreham, Mercury, 13 February 1932.
[5] Boreham, Mercury, 12 September 1931; Age, 14 September 1946.
[6] Boreham, Mercury, 13 February 1932.
[7] Boreham, Mercury, 13 February 1932.
[8] Boreham, Mercury, 12 September 1931; Age, 14 September 1946.
