Visit to the Turner Exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André

The Société des Amis de Marcel Proust offers its members a visit to the exhibition "Turner, Watercolours and Oils from the Tate Collection", commented on by Pierre Curie, curator of the exhibition and curator of the musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, 158 boulevard Haussmann, on Thursday 10 September at 9am.

The price of the visit is €15 per person. The visit is limited to 20 people.

Guided tours are currently forbidden at weekends at the musée Jacquemart-André, and take place early in the morning on weekdays, which is why the date of 10 September at 9am was chosen.

The exhibition frequently evokes John Ruskin and presents the watercolour "Le Port de Scarborough", which is thought to have inspired Proust in describing "Le Port de Carquethuit" of Elstir.

Extract from the museum's website:

"In 2020, the musée Jacquemart-André presents a retrospective of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851). Unquestionably the greatest representative of the golden age of English watercolour, he exploited its effects of light and transparency upon English landscapes and the lagoons of Venice.
This exhibition reveals the part played by watercolours in Turner's life and art, from the youthful works he sent to the Royal Academy to the fascinating experiments with light and colour of his maturity. To a modern audience, these latter rank among his most radical and accomplished works.

Thanks to exceptional loans from Tate Britain in London, which holds the largest collection of Turner in the world, the musée Jacquemart-André is hosting an exhibition of 60 watercolours and some 10 oil paintings, some of which have never before been shown in France.

Besides his finished works intended for sale, Turner kept for himself a considerable body of work, left at his death in his house and in his studio. With their own particular character, these sketches, more expressive and experimental, are certainly closer to his true nature than those painted for the public. In all, after the artist's death, the British nation received in 1856 an immense bequest comprising around a hundred oil paintings, unfinished studies and sketches, as well as thousands of works on paper: watercolours, drawings and sketchbooks.

The writer John Ruskin, one of the first to study the whole of this bequest, observed that Turner had produced most of these works "for his own pleasure". Now held at Tate Britain, this body of work reveals the full modernity of this great Romantic painter. The exhibition unveils part of this intimate collection, which offers unique insights into Turner's mind, imagination and private practice.

This monograph traces the young Turner, from a modest background. At first self-taught, he worked for an architect, took lessons in perspective and topography, then entered the Royal Academy school at the age of fourteen. An insatiable traveller, he gradually freed himself from the conventions of the pictorial genre and developed his own technique.

A chronological itinerary allows visitors to follow step by step his artistic development: from his youthful works, of a certain topographical realism, to the works of his maturity, more radical and accomplished, fascinating experiments in light and colour. Set here alongside a few finished watercolours and oil paintings to illustrate their influence on Turner's public output, these highly personal works remain as fresh and spontaneous as when they were born on paper.