Amy Concannon – Chasing the Sublime: J.M.W. Turner and the Majesty of the Mountains

Part of our Kendal Mountain Festival celebrations About Join Dr Amy Concannon, Manton Senior Curator of Historic British Art at Tate Britain, for a special talk exploring J.M.W. Turner, at Abbot Hall. Inspired by Turner’s dramatic Alpine watercolour The Passage of Mount St Gothard from the Centre of Teufels Broch (Devil’s Bridge) , from the Abbot Hall collection, this talk takes visitors on a visual journey through peaks, crags and mountain passes with one of Britain’s most influential landscape artists. Long before Turner became known as a master of light and radical abstraction, he was a young artist driven by a desire to capture the raw, untamed forces of nature. This presentation will explore how his formative summer tours through the mountain ranges of Wales and the rain-swept fells of Cumbria helped shape his early career and develop his fascination with the Sublime — an aesthetic of awe, terror and magnificent scale. The talk will also follow Turner on his transformative journey to the Alps, where glaciers, treacherous passes and dizzying precipices expanded his vision of landscape. Through memory, observation and radical watercolour techniques, Turner learned to picture mountains in a way that still feels powerful today. For a limited time during Kendal Mountain Festival, Turner’s The Passage of Mount St Gothard from the Centre of Teufels Broch (Devil’s Bridge) will be on display at Abbot Hall. Admission to the gallery is included with your event ticket, giving you the opportunity to see the work for yourself. Find out more about Turner’s painting here . This talk is £14.50 per person. We recommend booking tickets in advance due to limited spaces. Tickets can be booked through Kendal Mountain Festival’s website.