Joseph Turner's Rockets And Blue Lights

Joseph Mallord William Turner was an English artist who gained notoriety from his landscape paintings that utilize the dynamic lights that illuminate the scenery he builds. Joseph Turner’s work innovated and popularized landscape painting, which laid the foundation for impressionism to come into prevalence after the Romantic period. This is observed in his painting Rockets and Blue Lights, painted in 1840 with oil on canvas. Rockets and Blue Lights displays a coastal view of the ocean that sprawls across the canvas. The view extends deep into the far distance, where steamboats weather a storm in the vast sea. Water pours and flows from the middle-ground into the right side of the fore-ground in an attempt to swallow the coast. A small group of coastguards stand on the drowning land as they attempt to warn …show more content…
A blue flare rockets from the middle-ground into the back-ground; its luminescent glow suffocates in the dark and hazy storm clouds. The waves appear tumultuous, churning the water beneath the boats, like rapids pushing a buoyant leaf. Turner applies the use of sfumato to blend the clouds, ocean, and land to show the earth’s retreat from the intruding water. The clouds are stifling and haze the sky, obscuring the view of the boats in the distance. However, Turner implements the use of chiaroscuro to emphasize the contrast of the thickness of the threatening grey clouds, and the light of hope radiating from the flare. This masterpiece demonstrates one of the first clashes between nature and the industrial revolution. The steamboat, a juggernaut of human industrial strength, battles the tides in struggle for marine dominance. The unwavering rocket flies to