William Turner was an English painter whose life and work embody the transition from eighteenth-century landscape painting to a modern exploration of light and colour. He is widely regarded as one of the foremost English artists and an early precursor to the Impressionist vision, even though his career largely preceded the emergence of the French Impressionists. Turner’s influence was particularly strong in France, and it is manifestly reflected in Marcel Proust’s fictional painter, Elstir.
Over the course of his long career, landscape became for Turner a subject of profound artistic and philosophical inquiry. He travelled extensively throughout Britain, France, Italy, and other parts of Europe, producing thousands of sketches and paintings. His late works – such as Rain, Steam and Speed and Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps – approach the abstract, blending light and motion with an almost poetic intensity. Although he was formally associated with the Royal Academy, his relationship with the art institution was at times fraught. Turner was a difficult personality, often reclusive and, in later life, even enigmatic. Towards the end of his life he used a pseudonym and rarely engaged in social interactions.
In Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu, Elstir is a fictional painter who synthesises traits from several contemporary artists into a richly complex character. He embodies qualities of both Impressionists and Symbolists, yet William Turner stands as a central inspiration for his artistic aesthetic. Turner is referenced five times in the novel sequence. For instance, in The Guermantes Way, Elstir’s and Turner’s landscapes – “in which a traveller in a carriage or a guide at different altitudes in the Saint-Gothard pass is visible”* – are compared to one another.
Both Turner and Elstir engage with natural phenomena – particularly the sea, sky, and light – in a manner that seeks not to replicate nature but to capture the subjective impression it evokes. Both aim to convey how the world feels, not merely how it appears. Through Elstir’s paintings, Proust’s narrator learns to perceive his surroundings anew, just as a nineteenth-century viewer might have encountered the landscape transformed into a sublime experience through Turner’s vision.
Sources:
Badt, Kurt, The Art of Turner: From the Perspective of the Philosophy of Art. Oxford: Phaidon, 1969.
Gage, John, Turner: ”Rain, Steam and Speed”. London: Penguin Books, 1972.
Hamilton, James, Turner: A Life. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997.
Ruskin, John, Modern Painters, Vol. I. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1843.
Tadié 2000, pp.361,530,570,879.
Painter 1971, Vol. I, pp.281.
*RTP, Vol. II, p.861.