Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime

by Stanley Plumly

Overview

A sweeping look at the lives and work of two important English Romantic painters, from a Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author.

Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant” (Washington Post) nonfiction, explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. How is it that this disparate pair will come to be regarded as Britain’s supreme landscape painters, precursors to Impressionism and Modernism? How did each painter’s life influence his work?

Almost exact contemporaries, both legendary artists experience a life-changing tragedy—for Constable it is the long illness and death of his wife; for Turner, the death of his singular parent and supporter, his father. Their work will take on new power thereafter: Constable, his Hampstead cloud studies; Turner, his Venetian watercolors and oils. Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from their personal anguish, these talented painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective.

Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists’ lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though inherently connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393651508
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/21/2018
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Stanley Plumly (1939–2019) authored eleven books of poetry, including the National Book Award finalist Old Heart, and four books of nonfiction. His honors include the Paterson Poetry Prize and Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, among others. Plumly was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland as well Maryland’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2018.

Editorial Reviews

05/07/2018
Poet Plumly (The Immortal Evening) studies the lives and legacies of English Romantic painters John Constable (1776–1837) and J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), who he argues are “two of the greatest landscape painters regardless of nation or generation” in this vibrant dual biography. Plumly presents Constable as “a poet of place,” whose landscapes—especially his renderings of the Stour River valley—are steeped in nostalgia for the land’s pastoral past; whereas Turner is the more visionary of the two, as evident in his “transformation of landscape into the constituents of light.” Not favoring either artist over the other, Plumly compares and contrasts their work over the course of their lives, showing how their origins and ambitions, as well as life events—notably the death of Constable’s wife in 1828 and the death of Turner’s beloved father in 1829—shaped major phases of their careers. The book cries out for more illustration than its eight pages of color art reproduction, but Plumly’s poetic prose helps the reader to visualize the works, as when he writes, of Constable’s cloud studies, “he sees the equivalent of the invisible made visible, something beyond vapor,” and of Turner’s later paintings that he is “creating landscape as mist, as something ephemeral.” Plumly’s eye for detail and eloquent powers of description make this book a significant work of art history. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Twining biography with intense meditation on the paintings, Stanley Plumly shows how two starkly different landscape artists made masterpieces from ruin and grief, John Constable in quiet fields and clouds, J.M.W. Turner in scenes of storm and fire. This book is a hymn to art, in itself a work of visionary art."

Rosanna Warren

"This is a gorgeous book, visually, conceptually, and in the delights of reading. Stanley Plumly, with intimate immersion in the lives, the world, and the art of these two contemporary nineteenth-century artists, treats us to forty-one prose-poem chapters that are rival works of art in themselves: vignettes of intense, informed imagination, beautifully explicated, delicately informed, sympathetic, revelatory. He thinks as a poet, writes as poet, with the sure-footedness of an informed scholar and on-site researcher. Constable and Turner would come back to life just to see themselves in Elegy Landscapes, and do so, virtually, in Plumly’s vivid illuminations."

Susan J. Wolfson

"In this erudite and probing study, award-winning poet Stanley Plumly yields new insights into the iconic works of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, Britain’s greatest landscape artists. In the pastoral nostalgia of Constable and the modernist fury of Turner, Plumly finds a commonality in their quest to depict the sublime. A compelling portrait of two artists whose work continues to startle and amaze."

Donna M. Lucey

2018-05-08
A finely curated exploration of the progressive landscape paintings of John Constable (1776-1837) and J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851).In this rhapsodic investigation, Plumly (English/Univ. of Maryland; Against Sunset: Poems, 2016, etc.) positions these two master painters on a threshold in art history. Both Constable and Turner found that landscapes could mean more than simply their geography. Constable's work was imbued with autobiography and English history, while Turner looked forward, toward what may come when the storms pass and the clouds clear. "Constable's genius," Plumly explains, "invites a vision of what was…and Turner's genius demands a vision of what will be." Each artist found a way to incorporate narrative into their pastoral scenes, transcending traditional Arcadian visions into something more compelling and personally resonant. "The subtext of narrative is time," writes the author, "the subtext of time is emotion, the subtext of emotion, therefore, is mortality." Citing critics from John Ruskin to John Berger, Plumly chronicles Constable's and Turner's output as well as reception, detailing exhibitions at the Royal Academy and reactions from collectors across Europe. As a poet, the author is a particularly effective art historian, capable of re-creating these sublime masterpieces with his inspired prose. Constable's Stour Valley paintings are "indelible narratives of lost time," while Turner's circular brushwork is "made alive" by a "unique combustion of colors, as if the color wheel is being turned and converted into the blended hues and shades of nature." The author resists a traditional chronology, opting instead for a Turner-like vortex around major works by each artist and a particular idea. Some chapters focus on the artists' work with clouds and sky, some invoke Keats and Tennyson, and others touch on the artists' relations to groups like the pre-Raphaelites or the impressionists. This is a fresh way to curate these works for those familiar with Turner and Constable, but newcomers will find themselves yearning for a more biographical approach.A polyphonic, scholarly study of two of art history's most important figures.

Kirkus Reviews