Rain, Steam and Speed (detail of Locomotive)

9. Turner Joseph William “The Evening Star”

III «The Evening Star»

I want to focus more on the painting " Evening Star".

It is an example of the artist of light.

Turner was deeply interested in such transitional moments in nature: the evening star first appears in daylight and is soon supplanted by the stronger light of the moon. Here the pale point of the star is barely discernible in the sky, but is reflected clearly in the sea; in both places the star consists of thickly applied white paint.

In the foreground is a boy with a shrimping net and a small leaping dog. The painting is generally regarded as a study of the effects of light and atmosphere, rather than a finished work.

The artist created a new type of landscape, without further details. He opened their memories and experiences. In his paintings Turner introduced the images of the people in the scenes walks, picnics, field work. Thus the artist emphasized the imperfection of human nature, his impotence before the great outside world. quiet or menacing, but always indifferent.

As it is said in the source the title is not Turner's own, but is taken from some lines of Turner's verse scribbled in a sketchbook used in 1829-30.

I was interested in the idea. I assumed that this line of the poem by the English poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

H. Longfellow " The evening star"

Lo! in the painted oriel of the West,
Whose panes the sunken sun incarnadines,
Like a fair lady at her casement, shines
The evening star, the star of love and rest!

And then anon she doth herself divest
Of all her radiant garments, and reclines
Behind the somber screen of yonder pines,
With slumber and soft dreams of love oppressed.

O my beloved, my sweet Hesperus!
My morning and my evening star of love!

My best and gentlest lady! even thus,
As that fair planet in the sky above,
Dost thou retire unto thy rest at night,
And from thy darkened window fades the light.

Luke Elwes on Turner's 'The Evening Star'

Luke Elwes (born 1961) is a British contemporary artist.

«As part of The National Gallery's 'Artist's Eye' series, I have been asked to talk about my connection to 'The Evening Star'

Much of my work, like Turner’s, is inspired by my travels. It is also rooted in places much closer to home, often by the water, for which Turner felt a powerful affinity and which he returned to throughout his long life. The Evening Star is grounded in just such memories, and I have been drawn to it by my own parallel experience of working for extended periods since 2000 beneath the open skies and tidal margins of the Essex coast: a landscape suffused with the same light & mood as the places (Margate & Ramsgate in particular) he grew to know so well on the Kentish coast.

Just as he was drawn back to these places, so I am drawn back to Turner, in particular to his later watercolours and ‘unfinished’ paintings, where the myths and narratives that animated his more monumental canvases are replaced by luminous fields of paint that are more powerful and arresting for being less explicit and detailed. I first encountered these paintings as a boy and what I took from them then remains central to the dialogue that, in common with most painters, I continue to have with the past.'»