ABSTRACT
The idea of J.M.W. Turner as a dedicated visual witness has been much discussed since Ruskin's day, and it is now, perhaps, something of an accepted truth that his comprehensive gaze took in much more than his contemporaries' more limited vision of the world. That Turner did produce profound meditations on the nature of light and landscape is beyond doubt, as is our recognition that his wide-ranging intellect enabled him to produce significant artistic statements concerning contemporary politics, social observation, the development of technology or the place of art in society.1 Beyond these well-attested concerns, however, we can point to other features in his career which show him to have been touched by many of the issues discussed in this book. His early career spans the period in which most of the developments outlined in the preceding chapters took place, especially those debates concerning the relative merits of unmediated vision or artistic interpretation of the visible world. In this final chapter, therefore, we shall examine Turner's involvement with antiquarian and picturesque publications, his approach to working staffage figures and his own experiments with producing knowledge by means of taxonomic series. To do this is not to write an encomium on Turner, to suggest that he, somehow, overcame problems that defeated lesser artists; nor is it to exalt Turner as the only artist to see through the limitations of any simple equation of seeing with knowing. My intention here is more straightforward, to demonstrate the extent to which an art practice of recognized canonical authority might be brought into some sort of accommodation with the less familiar material we have examined in earlier chapters.
