Translating Painting into Print: J.M.W. Turner’s “Mercury and Argus”
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Mercury and Argus, 1836, partly repainted 1840, oil on canvas, 151.8 × 111.8 cm. Purchased 1951. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC. After the print was made, Turner partly repainted the canvas in 1840 for an exhibition.
Joseph Mallord William Turner was one of the most innovative British artists of his age, and his Mercury and Argus is one of the National Gallery of Canada’s most important European paintings. For Turner, light was the elemental force in the universe, and he explored its power in his later works. The glittering landscape under the blinding sun mirrors the myth, mixing beauty and violence. Io has been made a plaything of the gods: caught between the lust of Jupiter and the anger of his wife, Juno, she has been transformed into a white heifer and placed under the guard of the watchful Argus. Jupiter orders his son Mercury to steal her back and we see him lulling Argus to sleep with music, just before killing him. Within Turner's painting, this drama is only a small incident within the vast world the artist has created: the seemingly idyllic setting charged with the sun’s divine and overwhelming energy. The threat of violence is an intimate part of this world – as in Nature itself, powerful and beyond our control. He exhibited the painting in 1836 and soon decided to have it reproduced as a print.
“Reproductive” prints were immensely popular in 19th-century Europe. Created by professional printmakers from the designs of other artists, they were ubiquitous, ranging from book illustrations to large, single prints. The latter were the most prestigious form, avidly collected, even to the point of financial speculation, and were often framed and displayed in the home. Turner intimately understood this market and his fame and income rested in good part on prints.
J.T. Willmore and J.M.W. Turner, Mercury and Argus, 1839, etching and engraving on laid paper, extensively touched up in graphite, sheet: 75.9 × 60.2 cm. Purchased 2023. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC; The photograph has been slightly altered in order to enhance Turner's drawings and notes in the margins.
An experienced printmaker himself, Turner collaborated with professional engravers to create these works. For Mercury and Argus, he chose the London engraver James Tibbetts Willmore (1800–63). Both men wanted to work together on a large, ambitious print – their first such collaboration – and by October 1836 they had come to an agreement. Turner’s share of the venture was to be 250 of the 850 impressions. Not unusual for a work of this size and complexity, it had a long gestation, advertised as in progress in 1838 and finally published in 1839. The Gallery has recently acquired a “working proof,” taken from the unfinished plate and made so that the artists could assess their progress.
The skill of a professional printmaker lay in being able to “translate” between different art forms. Working with the canvas in front of him, Willmore found equivalents to form, colour and tone in a system of lines that he etched and engraved into the steel plate. Where possible, it was expected that painters would be consulted and approve reproductions of their work. Turner, who was notoriously demanding, pushed Willmore to achieve the subtlest effects. The painter drew extensively on the proof, marking up areas he wanted altered, and scratching out parts of the paper to start again or add a highlight. He drew in the margins and wrote out short instructions: “Put a bit of clear ground over this part and I will see if I can help the corner;” and “If you are open to lopping these branches away…” and “Make these two leaves of palm light along the stalks by the bough there.” Given his handwriting is at times illegible, these notes have been slightly adapted for clarity. Comparison with an impression of the finished print in the Gallery’s collection shows Willmore attempting to follow Turner’s instructions and refining his work.
J.T. Willmore and J.M.W. Turner, Mercury and Argus (detail), 1839. Detail showing some of Turner’s comments and drawings in the margins. Photo: NGC
The working proof provides insight into what Turner understood of his own canvas – what needed to, or could be, translated into the black-and-white image. Turner’s interventions went far beyond any simple notion of reproducing the canvas, and both artists sought to create an equivalent to the viewer’s experience of the painting. In his notes for a lecture, Turner wrote “engraving is or ought to be a translation of a picture, for the nature of each art varies so much in the means of expressing the same objects, that lines become the language of colours, the great object of the engraver’s study.” In turn, the knowledge gained from printmaking – how to think in terms of brightness and contrast – fed back into Turner’s paintings.
The print was well received and, 24 years later, it was singled out in Willmore’s obituary in The Art Journal (1 May 1863): “… the famous Mercury and Argus engraving, one of the most beautiful landscapes of modern times: it is executed in a style of Willmore’s own, perfectly free from mannerism or imitation – it is elaborately finished, yet brilliant in effect, with an infinite variety of tones and colours, from the richest black to the softest and most delicate tints.”
Many working proofs by Turner survive, almost all being in public collections. Although the Gallery has a sizeable number of prints by and after him, we had nothing comparable to this. Its purchase adds a new dimension to the national collection, capturing the intense collaboration of these two artists, as they translated painting into print.
J.M.W. Turner's Mercury and Argus is on view in Room C211 at the National Gallery of Canada. Share this article and subscribe to our newsletters to stay up-to-date on the latest articles, Gallery exhibitions, news and events, and to learn more about art in Canada.
