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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Embodied vulnerability in the art of J M W Turner
— representations of ageing in Romantic painting | | Author(s) | Steven P Wainwright |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 24, part 4, July 2004 |
| Pages | pp 603-616 |
| Source | http://journals.cambridge.org/ |
| Keywords | Painting ; Biological ageing ; Emotions. |
| Annotation | Narratives of ageing are an important theme in both medical sociology and the sociology of the body. Research on representations of the ageing body typically draw upon such subjects as the paintings of Rembrandt or Victorian literature. In this paper, the aim is to demonstrate that some of J M W Turner's pictures contain insightful narratives of ageing, the vulnerability of the body and the nature of shared humanity. Turner (1775-1851) is widely regarded as Britain's greatest painter and one of the world's greatest artists. The author contends that the central principle of Turner's Romantic art is the arousal of sensation. Although Turner is generally revered as a painter of landscape rather than the "body", the paper maintains that many of Turner's paintings can be read as studies in the vulnerability of the body. It will be shown, for example, that many of Turner's pictures are wonderfully evocative "visual poems" on the universal human experiences of loss, decline, the "fallacies of hope", grief, ageing, and death. The paper is therefore a cultural study of the "decline narrative" of ageing. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-040716006 A |
| Classmark | H7: BH: DL |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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