It seems Turner followed Claude in using similar methods of dividing up landscapes.
In the landscapes of Claude Lorraine, you often see the same elements appear, much like he worked to a formula. For example the use of temple columns placed before a screen of trees or of architecture on one side of the composition and nature/trees on the other side.
Claude used these elements in his compositions to create a better sense of depth and perspective. Claude's preliminary sketches show lines indicative of perspective studies and also intentions to scale up his drawings for later paintings. Claude’s drawn studies also demonstrate his focus on light and dark. He seems to have used light and dark as a tool not just to depict a sense of reality, a time of day perhaps, but also to emphasise parts of his compositions to tell a story.
JMW Turner (Source: The National Gallery Podcast regarding an Exhibition Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude, Summer 2012)
This exhibition explored the life-long fascination of the nineteenth-century British painter, JMW Turner for the work of the seventeenth-century master of Italianate landscapes, Claude Lorrain. Turner greatly admired Claude as a great landscape painter and aspired to not only equal him, but to surpass his achievements.
Below are two paintings on the subject of 'Tivoli:
Tobias and the Angel'. The first work is
by Claude and the second by Turner.
Turner
most admired Claude’s ability to give a sense of the special character of a
lighting effect. In the above painting Turner uses the Claudean model,
structuring it in a way that follows Claude's precedent where you
have a tree dividing the composition about a third of the way across the
composition and there’s a great recession to a distant hillside, and as the
forms move into the distance they become softer and softer.
The way Turner’s painted it, even though it’s an unfinished canvas, is
much more broken down, not quite the same attention to detail.
Turner suggests things in a more abstract way; his colour moves from the
kind of brown-ish foreground that is typical in Claude, to softer greens
and blues as it moves into the distance and then the yellow in the sky is
probably a pigment that was only newly introduced in the 1820s. So it is a
re-thinking of the Claudean model.
Turner studied and copied the works of many
great artists in his drive to become a great artist himself. Aside from
following Claude's lead, over a period of 30 years Turner taught the subject
of perspective to the students of the Royal Academy. To aid him in
his lectures he produced a portfolio of diagrams, demonstrating the theories of
different artists and critics on perspective.
