Landscape with Water

Landscape with Water, dated around 1840 and listed with dimensions of 1219 by 1822 centimetres — almost certainly a data error; the actual dimensions are likely much smaller — belongs to Turner's late series of nearly abstract landscape studies in which water and sky dominate to the exclusion of almost all topographical specificity. By 1840 he was producing works that contemporary critics called incomprehensible — 'pictures of nothing and very like,' as one wag put it — and that later generations would recognise as anticipating the colour field painting of the 1950s. Constable, who died in 1837, had been the other great master of English landscape in Turner's generation, and his death removed the principal alternative vision of what English landscape painting could achieve. Turner's late abstraction was not driven by grief or decline but by the logical extension of a painterly intelligence that had always been moving toward the reduction of nature to its pure atmospheric essentials: light, colour, and the spatial relationships between land, water, and sky.

Turner reduces the landscape to its essential elements, using broad washes of luminous color and minimal definition to create a composition that approaches pure atmospheric abstraction.