Today, J. M. W. Turner is arguably the most widely recognized artist of nineteenth-century Britain. He has been much on display during the past few years, thanks to several major exhibitions and their accompanying publications: J. M. W. Turner (Ian Warrell, ed., London: Tate Publishing, 2007), Turner and the Masters (David Solkin, ed., London: Tate Publishing, 2009), and Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude (Ian Warrell, ed., London: National Gallery, 2012). The first of these exhibitions brought Turner’s works before U.S. audiences and provided a fresh evaluation of his career; the latter two focused on the artist’s intense engagement with the art of the past. In addition to being a draw at museums, Turner continues to appear in classrooms: he is regularly featured in art-history survey courses next to fellow landscape painters Caspar David Friedrich and John Constable. But Leo Costello’s new book, J. M. W. Turner and the Subject of History, raises the intriguing question of whether Turner should also be seen alongside painters of history, such as Jacques-Louis David, and artists who repurposed history painting to new ends, such as Théodore Géricault.

J. M. W. Turner and the Subject of History focuses in particular on the artist’s relationship to history painting as it was practiced in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century. However, those seeking extended consideration of Turner’s representations of Biblical, classical, or literary subjects should look elsewhere, as Costello explicitly sets out to examine what he calls Turner’s “scenes of contemporary history” (1). This term is an oxymoron, to be sure, but just as there really is such a thing as jumbo shrimp, Costello demonstrates that, for Turner and his generation, there really was such a thing as “contemporary history,” defined as recent events invested with the significance of grand manner painting. Some of the paintings that serve as Costello’s case studies depict events seen as historical cataclysms in Turner’s own day, such as Napoleonic sea battles. Others lack overt narrative content, yet allusively chart the progress of time, as in Turner’s many images of Venice. The history of Costello’s title, then, refers both to the tradition of history painting and to historical change itself. Similarly, as he explains in the introduction, the subject of the title refers simultaneously to subject matter, to the artist himself, and to the “elaboration of changing notions of individual subjectivity in an age of developing and fragmenting nationhood” (1). In the face of those changing notions, Costello argues, Turner invented a new way of painting history, one that depicted the historical process and the creative process as both productive and destructive. Just as Venice molders in the wake of empire, yet inspires new art, Turner redeploys the conventions of tradition, only to invalidate them.

Costello explores these themes of art, history, and change in five related chapters. The opening chapter examines several works that explicitly respond to previous modes of history painting: Turner’s representations of the battle of Trafalgar, a decisive conflict that eased fears of a Napoleonic invasion but also cost Britain the life of its leading admiral, Horatio Nelson. In his first painting of this battle, Turner overturned the visual conventions of history painting, and Costello argues that in the process he “formed an altered means for expressing the position of the individual before society” (17). (Yet, as I note below, it is difficult to assess the significance of Turner’s formal choices in this work without a complete account of his visual precedents, notably marine painting.) Chapter 2 considers the themes of destruction and creation more broadly, examining scenes of shipwreck, avalanche, and Napoleonic land battles. Through this wide range of examples, the chapter highlights Turner’s interest in the fragmentary and incomplete, both as visual source and visual result. Chapter 3 turns to a different aspect of Turner’s production: his performances of artistic virtuosity at Varnishing Days, events at which artists could retouch their works on the walls of an exhibition (at the Royal Academy, this opportunity was limited to Academicians). Here the issue of change over time—or lack thereof—has an explicitly political edge. Costello’s analysis convincingly demonstrates that critics used the language of parliamentary reform, a central issue of the day, to deride these performances as an exercise of entrenched privilege. Chapter 4 transfers the focus abroad, to Venice, while also keeping one foot in the British Isles. Costello claims that for Turner the city operated as a prefiguration of the fate of the British empire, as a model for the action of time on human endeavor, and as a source of sensual and erotic satisfaction. Here Costello argues against the reading of Turner’s late Venetian works as a retreat from narrative content, showing how the formal dissolution of the canvases parallels contemporary interest in the physical and metaphorical decline of the city. The book concludes with a chapter on Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead or the Dying—Typhon Coming On, more commonly known as The Slave Ship (1840), which ties the theme of destruction and creation, seen throughout the book, to questions of individual and collective moral responsibility in the face of the slave trade.

Each of these chapters features vivid, extended formal and conceptual analyses of individual paintings. For example, Costello’s description of The Field of Waterloo (1818), which shows women searching among the dead and wounded by lamplight, demonstrates that the painting’s grotesque intensity results not just from the subject matter but also from Turner’s treatment of it: “Turner combines the invocation of cataclysmic destruction with a process of slow decay . . . . an intricate intertwining of limbs and bodies suggests the loss of individual form and the creation of a single, unified, emphatically dead, yet still actively decaying, body” (87). This passage sheds new light on a difficult work and provides compelling support for Costello’s argument that for Turner creation, destruction, and history were inextricably linked.

Yet Costello’s close attention to Turner and his works is not always matched by an equally nuanced sense of the painter’s historical or artistic contexts. His analysis could benefit from a fuller account of the tradition of history painting Turner inherited from his eighteenth-century predecessors. History painting in Britain was in Turner’s day a recent, fragile, contested development, not nearly as well established as on the European continent. The history project in Britain, barely two generations old, was not economically viable for most artists. While Costello compares Turner’s output with the works of several eighteenth-century artists who did manage to make a living from history painting, he does not provide a full explication of this tradition as it actually was practiced. Instead, he refers most often to eighteenth-century theory, in the form of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses. While the impact of this text on Turner cannot be denied, Turner also would have been intensely aware of the slippage between theory and practice—a slippage that Reynolds’s own career exemplified. In the absence of a market for the history painting that he advocated, Reynolds pioneered the hybrid genre of the grand manner portrait. This hybrid genre provided an important model for Turner’s own historical landscapes, which also sought to elevate a traditionally less prestigious but economically viable genre. Costello briefly mentions the perceived failures of the British school of history painting at the end of chapter 2, yet the overall impression conveyed by this book is that history painting was a dominant and indeed oppressive mode of practice, which was far from the case.

Further, by treating history painting as the only genre Turner might be challenging, Costello leaves out important aspects of the artist’s project. The most problematic omission is marine painting, a serious issue given the preponderance of seascapes among the works that Costello considers at length. For example, in the first chapter, Costello compares Turner’s The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory (1806–8) to previous representations of glorious deaths in battle by Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley. Turner’s painting, as Costello rightly observes, uses the compositional model provided by these precedents—a group gathered around a fallen hero—and immerses that group in a sweeping scene of battle. But history painting was not the only tradition that informed this work; unlike the military actions depicted by West and Copley, Turner’s subject was a naval battle. Eighteenth-century Britain had a vibrant visual tradition of depicting naval battles, which were typically represented from a distant viewpoint, with the horizon line near the center of the canvas. Curiously, Costello mentions Turner’s response to this genre in his later, 1825 depiction of Trafalgar, but not in relation to this earlier painting. Here, Costello cites but neglects the arguments of important recent scholarship on the cultural significance of marine painting by Geoff Quilley and Eleanor Hughes (Geoff Quilley, “Missing the Boat: The Place of the Maritime in the History of British Culture,” Visual Culture in Britain 1, no. 2 (2000): 79–92; Eleanor Hughes, “Ships of the ‘Line’: Marine Paintings at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1784,” in Art and the British Empire, eds., Timothy Barringer, Geoff Quilley, and Douglas Fordham, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007, 139–52). This is a shame, because an acknowledgment of the importance of this genre and its conventions would have reinforced Costello’s characterization of Turner as an artist who simultaneously inhabited and undermined his visual precedents.

These concerns aside, there is much in Costello’s book to appreciate, including its emphasis on the intimate relationship between creation and destruction in Turner’s practice. This theme provides a model for thinking more generally about Turner’s ambivalent relationship to the art of the past, and thus this book can usefully be read in combination with Turner and the Masters. Costello also provides a new way to understand well-known and seemingly contradictory episodes from Turner’s career, such as his accumulating a collection of his own works for posterity, only to expose them to danger in his ill-maintained London gallery. Seen in light of Costello’s thesis, the artist’s simultaneous accumulation and destruction of his oeuvre is not late-career eccentricity, but a continuation of a theme seen in the works themselves. Costello concludes with an affirmation of Turner’s complexity, calling for scholarship that treats him as a “conflicted, contradictory, ambivalent subject” (237). This is a salutary approach. If J. M. W. Turner and the Subject of History stops short of a full exploration of this “ambivalent subject,” it is because the visual traditions that Turner adapted deserve an equally comprehensive account.