National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Turner to Monet: the triumph of landscape

J M W TURNER, Crossing the brook 1815

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Synopsis

Turner looks to Claude Lorrain, the great artistic model of seventeenth-century Classical landscape painting, for his composition of Crossing the brook. Devices include framing trees to left and right, while Turner also uses light to lead the eye through a curving central valley until it meets a limpid white sky, which dissipates upwards into palest blue. Dark planes intersect in the foreground across the front of the water, down through the foliage and tunnel path on the right. A spotlight picks out three figures who ford the brook: one girl has waded across, then looks back to her dog in midstream. The animal helps by carrying her basket, while another young woman prepares on the far bank by removing her shoes and tucking up her dress. Further along the valley are an aqueduct and large waterwheel. We are not in the Roman campagna, however, but rather in an equivocal English Arcadia. The brook leads into the River Tamar, which divides Devon from Cornwall, while the arches belong to Calstock Bridge. The whee