Original subtitles

(LIGHTNING CRACKS)

Joseph Mallord William Turner is regarded as one of

the most original and influential British artists of all time.

His work was transformative.

It shocked the Victorians and paved the way for modern art.

170 years after his death,

Turner's influence is still apparent today.

MAN: His art was absolutely transcendental

and almost spiritual.

NICK: He was the nation's greatest landscape artist.

But there's more to him.

There's another layer there.

He is a cryptic artist.

ERICA: We have now found hidden images that are electrifying.

Despite having been viewed by millions of people,

previously unnoticed, complex images

painted with precision

that have been overlooked for 170 years

have been found hidden within the paint strokes

of Turner's greatest works.

Throughout a number of the paintings, we found that,

astonishingly, a bear appears time and time again.

And we've come to the conclusion

that Turner represents himself as a bear.

There's this white flag of Turner's emblem,

which is a bear's head

with a high collar of the kind Turner wore.

But there are other narratives within this painting

that relate to Nelson trashing Napoleon's fleet.

He painted the head of a goose,

and we found this in more than one Turner work.

He's saying steam is the golden goose of the future.

It is going to produce great wealth.

Turner was a very tormented, brilliant man.

It wouldn't surprise me at all that there are secret meanings, codes, emblems.

I've seen some of my own.

Turner, he was a genius.

Nick is giving so many other layers of meaning.

Oh! That is... Oh, my God.

That is... What the...? Sorry, I don't want to swear.

Can you see a face, a man's head, here?

I'm going to say it looks more like a chicken, actually, Nick, but...

That looks like genitalia to me.

(BOTH LAUGH)

Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

It's this amazing kind of moment of...

..of decoding.

These groundbreaking discoveries

are the result of five years' extensive research

and cast new light on Turner's most famous paintings.

It began with the purchase of a painting.

Within that painting, we found some hidden images.

And because of that, we looked across to some works by Turner.

And there, looking out of the painting at me...

..was Turner.

Unbelievable.

This is significant because there is only one known self-portrait

by Turner in oils,

and we've found a lot more smaller ones.

We're very certain that these are Turner himself.

When I found one or two...

quite large and impressive images, I had to go and lie down.

I hadn't experienced anything like that.

ERICA: There is a history of artists hiding things in paintings.

They've been doing it for centuries.

There's Giotto, who hid a devil in clouds...

..Michelangelo, who outlined a brain in the Sistine Chapel...

..and Gainsborough even hid genitalia.

And these are becoming increasingly researched now.

But what we found in Turner, nobody has ever discovered before.

NICK: But it isn't just about images.

It's about really the life and times of Turner...

..expressed by him in paint.

These hidden images reveal new narratives

where none has previously existed

and have the potential to rewrite the history

of Britain's greatest painter.

This will very definitely change the way that we engage with his work.

And in at least four paintings,

we have a complete reinterpretation of that painting.

There are multiple instances

of the same image appearing across paintings.

It's hugely significant. We're in new territory here.

Born in 1775,

Turner is famed as Britain's painter of land, sea and light.

But Dr Nicholas Wilkinson and his wife Erica

think there is far more to Turner's work -

if you look at it in a new way...

closely.

ERICA: Nick has a doctorate in physical chemistry,

working on the molecular level,

and this requires three-dimensional visualisation.

And that is how this relates to his work on Turner.

He sometimes has been obsessed.

At home, there'll be computer screens with an image of Turner.

There'll be an iPad with an image of Turner.

Then he'll be sitting with his iPhone with an image of Turner.

And he was always blowing them up,

reducing them and rotating them.

We've had to keep this secret for...

..five years,

so it has been incredibly difficult.

I worked in science for 15 years,

but then we bought a painting.

When I first looked at this marine painting,

there was a face looking out at me,

a hidden anamorphic image,

and I was quite shocked by that.

I found it to be quite disquieting

cos we were dealing with such a famous artist.

The Turner code

started to emerge

when I'd looked at 30 or 40 of his paintings

and found new narratives and recurrence between those paintings.

There were definite themes that started to occur

that were not known in Turner scholarship.

First of all, his titles are complicated and cryptic.

They are a bit like the satirical print titles of the time,

which are in two or more parts.

And part of that title is cryptic

and it tells you what to find in the painting.

The second part of the code

is anamorphic elements in the painting

to tell the narratives.

And those anamorphic elements are twofold.

They are pareidolic.

That means taking something inanimate

and turning it into something animate.

Or anthropomorphic,

which means taking multiple elements

and combining them into a single hidden image.

I think you need a fresh eye

to see Turner in the way that Nick has discovered him.

I was a trained art historian

and I didn't believe at first

that Turner would do something like this.

But then the more I read about his personality,

I realised that would have been entirely in keeping

with the kind of person that he was.

It appears that he definitely wanted

these hidden images to be found,

but he camouflaged them so skilfully

that they haven't been found for nearly 200 years.

What we would very much like to do is to show these hidden images

and all our theories to art experts.

We'd like to get their reactions.

In 1838, Turner painted The Fighting Temeraire,

showing an old battleship being towed to be broken up.

The ship had been part of Lord Nelson's fleet

at the Battle Of Trafalgar.

Turner never sold the painting,

which he called "my darling".

Turner had grown up...

as a boy,

looking at these great ships of the Napoleonic wars.

You know, the heroic time of Nelson

and, you know, Waterloo.

In this picture, he's actually painting the end of it all.

This tug is pulling, with steam power,

the great sail ship of the past.

And people who wrote about the picture

commented on how this squat,

ugly, black, dark, little horrible tug

was pulling this graceful, beautiful

emblem of Britain's glorious maritime past

to destruction.

Yet, at the same time, I think Turner's not

entirely lamenting it

because, for me, Turner's identifying himself with that tug.

You know, Turner wore this black top hat.

He was a diminutive man.

So the tug, for me, IS Turner, and the tug represents

modern vision as well as the modern age of steam.

So it's complicated, it's a lament,

but it's also Turner saying,

"If I had to choose my own side,

my side is the modern."

Dr Wilkinson wants to see if he can convince

one of Britain's leading art historians

that there is even more to the work

than initially meets the eye.

There is a strange image on the left-hand side

of The Fighting Temeraire...

..and if you look at it carefully,

it appears as a screaming head...

with a high collar...coat on

and it's impaled from above by a wooden stake.

And we propose that is Napoleon.

That's great. So it's a bit like Francis Bacon's screaming Pope,

except it's a screaming Napoleon.

To be fair, I CAN see a shape like a cocked hat,

and I can see where you would see a sort of...

I suppose it's almost like Munch's Scream.

What is it actually in the illusion of the painting?

It is a gun port.

There are three gun ports.

Two are his eyes and the other is his screaming mouth.

Right.

He's created something from those elements.

In your interpretation, I presume that would be a reference

to The Fighting Temeraire's role in the Battle Of Trafalgar.

This is the ship that speared Napoleon for once and for all.

Absolutely. The British tactic

was to fire into the hull of the French ships,

cause massive splinters that disabled the crew.

So, they actually speared by great pieces of wood?

They were speared by big pieces of wood.

Look at the top.

Ships attached their prize to their side and then sold it to market.

So, this is a metaphorical prize of Napoleon's head.

I suppose, in a sense, it's Napoleon's head on a stick.

Wellington had a statue of Napoleon placed in Apsley House.

Wellington wanted Napoleon in his house because he was his prize.

"I am the man who defeated Napoleon."

It's the same thought. Whether you see it or not.

And people can choose whether they agree

with your anthropomorphic reading of these things,

and whether their eyes are the same as your eyes.

At least in the case of this interpretation,

it's not as if it's overturning the meaning of the picture.

Or it's not as if it's giving it some kind of mad twist.

It's actually reinforcing what we know Turner probably thought.

It's another layer within the painting.

But will other Turner enthusiasts also concede

that one of the world's most famous paintings

might have a screaming, defeated Napoleon hiding in plain sight?

On the side of the Temeraire...

he's created...

a head and shoulders.

No... Surely he hasn't. Not on...

Not on this famous, most-loved painting?

First of all, can you see...

..that this is a screaming head,

like Edvard Munch? Aaahh.

Right... Years before Ed Munch.

Where's the mouth? His mouth is here.

The eye is here. Yeah.

The admiral's hat is...

The golden braid is on top of his head.

He has...

a big collar and shoulder here,

and he's pinned to the side of the Temeraire.

Gee!

Wow. In fact...

it is...

we propose, Napoleon. Can you see it?

Of course. (CHUCKLES)

Wow. I think I need to have a drink

cos that is just absolutely mad.

If you look at the £20 note

and you will see Napoleon's head screaming

on the side of the Temeraire. I just can't believe that.

I can't believe that's not been seen before...

because it's there but visible and invisible.

I like that expression. It is both.

It is both. Yes. It's deliberately invisible.

Yeah, but...

But there is a challenge for the nation

to go find his hidden images.

On the left-hand side, beyond topographical form,

created from...

A sort of skull. ..the angle,

there's a sort of skull.

Yes. Yes. I can see a sort of skull.

He's got a high collar coat on...

Yeah. ..with a shoulder.

I can... I can see what you're getting at.

It even has a circular form on the hat here.

I'm gonna suggest to you that that's a cockade...

..and that cockade is an emblem of the French Revolution.

It's very interesting. Once you see the shapes, you CAN see them. But...

Yeah. I mean, whether...

whether that's what that is, I'm not sure,

but I can see what you're saying.

You may never wipe that from your mind.No.

We suggest this is...

..Napoleon impaled to the side of the Temeraire.

He was a prize of the Temeraire. Can you see it?

Yeah...

It could be a unicorn, you know.

(LAUGHS) I think it's a unicorn.

I'm not sure if it's... Napoleon impaled.

I can imagine he'd, like...

enjoy the secretness of it all and the fun of it all

if he DID, you know,

if he did imbue these paintings with hidden symbolism.

Yeah.But do you think that was very much of the time,

that's what people were doing generally?

No. Just Turner. Just Turner.

You look at others, there is nothing there.OK.

What would you say about that image

in our proposal that it's Napoleon?

The first thing I would observe is that...

the bow of the ship makes his hat.

And what I'd always thought about this painting

is that the perspective of the ship coming towards the viewer

is a little odd.

The fact that it is concealing an image of Napoleon

would explain that...

that Turner might have adapted the perspective

in order to accommodate this hidden face.

It appears to be a sort of three-dimensional...

..entity on the side of the boat, screaming in agony.

Can you see that at all?

No, I can't see that. I really can't.

I mean, you know, I understand why Napoleon might be...

..associated.

The story's kind of...there.

It's imminent all the time in that painting.

I don't see why you would then put more...

more into it, more information.

I don't think it needs it.

I think it's a simple story well told.

The Freudian theory was that you may try to repress something,

but it will come out somewhere else

because of strong, unconscious impulses.

It will come out in art. It will come out in your dreams.

It may come out in the slip of a tongue

in the middle of a conversation.

So if Turner is hiding something and has got a secret code

and trying to send an underhand message to the world,

the deeper psychological question psychologists would ask

is "What's his motivation?"

So, one reason why people sometimes embed codes,

or send signals in a hidden way, is a mischievousness,

a playfulness, and a kind of showing off.

And if Turner had a strong sense of superiority over other people,

he may be showing off if he tries to hide codes.

JMW Turner was indeed a well known show-off.

Every year at the opening of the Royal Academy Exhibition,

crowds watched him add finishing touches

that transformed his paintings.

Turner was famous for turning up and making changes that...

..would seem to put the artists around him,

and their paintings, down, and make his picture pop up.

So he's hugely, hugely competitive.

I mean, Turner's personality is a very strange one

because on the one hand, he was crude, he was rude,

he was dishevelled, he was kind of a complete mess of a man.

He was also an extremely intelligent and well-read man.

He was aware of modern science and technology.

He read philosophy.

He composed his own poems.

He understood a great deal about history,

and he cared deeply about his own legacy.

And he wanted his pictures to be shown together,

exhibited together,

as part of his own legacy,

to be rooted in British history

in the way that his paintings depicted British history.

After extensive research,

the Wilkinsons have concluded that,

through a series of concealed images,

Turner represented himself as a bear.

If you look, he's resurrected all the masts on the Temeraire,

but put no flags on them.

But he's put this very prominent white flag

on the mast of the tugboat.

What do you see in the flag?

The flag is his emblem, the bear's head.

And that bear's head is looking down at the Temeraire.

You would see ears in the top left corner of the flag

and you'd see the bear's snout in the bottom left corner.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I have to... To me, I can see an animal,

but that's the thing about drapery in painting.

Yeah. But I'm gonna, you know,

if it sort of reinforces my idea that the tug was Turner,

then, of course, I'm interested.

Within the Temeraire,

the only flag flying is on the tugboat.

It's a white flag.

But when you look at it... what he has done...

It seems completely the head of a bear.

It's the head of a bear. This one is incredible.

Are you able to see that?

The question is, are we looking at something

that Turner intended us to look at,

or is this something that is by chance

which creates this shape? I'm not sure.

Why is Turner sending these messages?

What's going on?

Cos a Freudian theory would be that he's repressed in some sense

or society is repressing him

and he has to get a way of getting a message out.

To send a code, you're hiding it from someone

and you want other people to see it.

One of the issues for Turner had started early in his life

when he was the president of Perspective at the Royal Academy.

He presented lectures there and... he was derided for that,

because his verbal style was not comprehensible.

And people joked at his expense about that, unfortunately.

I'd suggest he is recording in paint...

..the narrative of his life through a series of paintings.

But why do it in a coded way?

Maybe it's a sort of parlour game approach.

The parlour game was something in the early Victorian period

for people to find hidden images,

to give them little clues as to what it might be...

..and to give them an additional level of looking at his work.

That painting is beautiful enough as it is.

He doesn't have to put a coded message in.

Once he starts doing that,

it begins to distract from the beauty of that painting.

You don't need a coded message.

If anything, the fact there's a coded message in there

begins to detract or distract the viewer

from the appreciation of that painting.

That being so, if you don't know there's a coded message there,

it is of no consequence.

OK. That's a very, very interesting counterargument.

When Nick first said, "Can you see a bear here?"

I said, "Yeah, but so what? Yeah, it looks like a bear.

But prove to me it's intended as a bear."

And only by looking extensively across several paintings,

has Nick been able to build up an argument

that has convinced me... to quite a sufficient degree.

ERICA: We found out that the bear is the Venetian painter Titian's

personal device, which was illustrated

in the most wonderful cartouche,

a lovely she-bear.

And between her front paws there is a lumpen block.

She is about to lick this block into shape

to reveal a bear cub.

And the idea is that this has a direct parallel

to the activity of artists.

Titian was regarded as the great colourist...

..and Turner saw himself as Titian's heir.

Therefore, there is a good reason

for him choosing the bear as his personal emblem.

Dr Wilkinson believes that

Turner concealed other controversial images

within The Fighting Temeraire.

The yellow and orange shape at the end of the dirty plume

is actually a goose's head looking down the plume.

It is an eye and a breathing hole.

That's how you can identify it.

And he's portraying steam as the golden goose of the future age.

I can't see the goose. OK.

I don't see this.

This is like one of those Magic Eye things that I just can't see.

I'm afraid I'm not convinced by the goose in the smoke.

OK.

Now I'm going to show you the head of a goose.

It could be a face of many animals.

Yeah. Actually.

But I'm thinking that could also be...

For me, I can't stop seeing...

Sorry.

But...a pig.

(CHUCKLES GOOFILY)

TIM: I can see something that could be interpreted like that.

Hmm. But I'm going to say...

..I think it would change the whole nature of the painting to do that.

Yeah. Because he's a...

He's also an observational painter.

He's painting real things.

And why would he want to jeopardise that,

you know, powerful impression of reality.

I'm so curious about this gigantic goose

kind of dominating everything.

I wonder what that tells us about Turner himself

and why he chose these images.

ERICA: We could see geese heads time and time again,

so we came to the conclusion this was a reference

to steam that was regarded

as the golden goose of the nation's wealth.

A number of history's most famous paintings

contain extraordinary secrets

that are still being uncovered centuries after their completion.

I think it's wonderful, this new kind of hobby

that seems to be sweeping the world,

which is people finding secret symbols in paintings.

One of the great British painters of the 18th century

was Thomas Gainsborough,

and one of his most famous paintings -

it's one of the most popular paintings in Britain -

is Mr And Mrs Andrews, which is in the National Gallery.

People have loved this painting for centuries,

but they hadn't really noticed that at the very centre of the painting,

on Mrs Andrews' lap,

Gainsborough had actually drawn a squiggle of a penis,

perhaps to get back at the couple.

We know that he didn't finish the painting

because the relationship with the patrons broke down,

and so perhaps he was getting revenge

on Mr or Mrs Andrews by doing that.

(LAUGHS) There's a far more prominent male member

in Gainsborough's portrait of Countess Howe in Kenwood.

And if you read Gainsborough's letters,

why should anyone be surprised about this?

He's constantly writing, in his letters -

and indeed I think in his diary - about how aroused he becomes.

Why should we be surprised?

One of the earliest instances of Turner using hidden imagery

is in his 1829 painting Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus...

and the clue is in the title.

It describes the classical hero Ulysses,

taunting a giant Cyclops called Polyphemus,

from which he has escaped.

And though we can see Ulysses on his ship,

Polyphemus is harder to spot

because he is made out of clouds.

In this painting, there are some known hidden images.

There's the title, which is Polyphemus up in the clouds.

Have you seen that before?

Yes. Polyphemus is relatively easy to see.

I think there are the horses in the sun,

which are also fairly easy to see.

But you'd miss them if you stayed at...

if you stayed at a distance of six to eight feet from the painting,

which is - for a picture like this - classically the correct distance.

So it's... Perhaps it's one of Turner's ways

of making you walk into his sun, having those horses there.

So there are other images as well.

The flag halfway up the flagpole there.

Are you aware that there is a Trojan horse on wheels

sitting in the flag...

and then, behind, there are buildings that are on fire?

But, yes, I do see what you mean.

Yeah. And I'm absolutely

prepared to accept the possibility that that might be there

because, you know, something like a flag for Turner

is an opportunity for these little graphic finesses.

Turner had this compulsive need to put graffiti everywhere.

So that all over his paintings,

you find these sort of secret messages and things

that are scurrying almost half out of sight.

So, you know, absolutely, I'm happy to see a Trojan horse.

I CAN see a Trojan horse on wheels now.

Great. Lovely.

Finally, at the very top of the mast there

is a bear's head with a bridle on it.

His ear is attached to the mast, and he's looking out right,

looking forward in the direction of the ship.

Written on that...

..it's the word U-L-Y, "Uly".

Maybe you can see it. Uly.

So he's painted Ulysses...

..as a bear on the mast head.

I would suggest to you that he saw himself

as a journeying Ulysses.

Why would Ulysses be in the shape of a bear?

Is that because the bear is Turner's own emblem

that he borrows from Titian?

In your personal mythology of Turner, how does that work?

Correct. The bear's head is Turner's self emblem.

It appears in many paintings.

I'm not sure about the bear's head, but essentially,

I don't disagree with your idea

of Turner identifying himself with Ulysses...

..the endless, restless traveller

who finds it so hard to settle

and whose life is knocked awry

but his destiny leads him always onwards.

Actually, Turner is part of the ship, heading onwards.

If you look at the sail form.

It's got a big hooked nose on the right-hand side.

And then there's an eye there in the sail form -

and he uses sails as images -

is Turner's head surging forward.

Well, I must say, if you're gonna...

The thing is, for this kind of transformation

of something abstract into an actual image,

you do have a very good precedent in Leonardo da Vinci,

who says, you know, "Look at the stains on a wall.

Look at the clouds in the sky. Look at the drapery.

And if you see a shape in it, make it the basis for a painting."

So this idea of seeing shapes in clouds or in sail cloth

or in, you know, a bit of sea...

..Leonardo da Vinci said that's what artists do.

The Wilkinsons' research has taken them across the UK.

But there is one place overseas that was special to Turner.

Venice.

He arrived here. He was doing the Grand Tour.

He was always travelling. He was a person very curious.

Turner, like so many British people, was just obsessed with Italy.

It was the "golden ticket" for him.

He drew thousands of sketches when he was in Italy.

He made hundreds of paintings inspired by Italy.

And I think Italy - and Venice in particular -

fundamentally transformed his art.

I think that was what propelled him

into this journey towards an art of light and colour.

Then he started to understand the light

and the way of painting of Titian and Tintoretto.

Dr Wilkinson is visiting some of the sites Turner would have seen...

..viewing frescoes by Venetian Renaissance artists

Titian and Tintoretto, that Turner sketched.

And even the street Tintoretto lived in...

..defined by its turbaned statues.

And the Palazzo del Cammello, or Camel House, where he lived.

It's no surprise that Venice is the setting

for one of Turner's most cryptic paintings.

Exhibited in 1833,

it shows Venice as the city of canals,

with its famous Bridge Of Sighs,

Ducal Palace and Custom House.

It also features an artist.

The traditional interpretation

is that this is the 17th-century Venetian painter Antonio Canal,

known by his nickname "Canaletto", which means "son of Canal".

But Turner's cryptic title is not "Canaletto",

but "Canaletti".

FRANNY: Titles are really important in Turner's work.

When he entitles one of his paintings "Canaletti"

rather than "Canaletto",

I think Nick is right to think

this may be an invitation

to consider the work as something of a riddle.

I think there is a clue in that title

by using an Italian plural.

NICK: His title is cryptic. "Canaletti Painting"

suggests to me "sons"

and it suggests to me "sons of Canal".

To me, "sons of Canal" means "the sons of Venice",

because Venice is canal.

And what you find in this painting -

I am going to propose to you, and I welcome your thoughts -

that he has taken this painting and painted in the sons of Venice.

Wow. All right?

So we have great famous Venetian people in here.

I think there's a son of Venice represented here in general

by the sublime painting of the buildings.

If you look at the painting as a whole,

the top two thirds is of a Canaletto-style painting.

It rivals Canaletto. Yeah.

And he's, in a way,

competed with Canaletto by presenting this,

but has paid homage to him as a son of Venice

in the nature of the painting of the buildings in the background.

I would put this proposal to you

that the artist painting at the easel,

it isn't Canaletto painting.

This is actually Titian painting.

He's wearing a Titian-red coat. Yes.

You look and it is known that this painting is amazingly framed.

Yeah. Right? With a guild frame.

And the actual painting image that looks out at you

is a bear. Two eyes.

Two eyes and a muzzle is a bear.

Now, the bear was Titian's emblem.

Beneath Titian, reflected in the water,

is a caricature image,

self-image of Turner.

Turner is looking at the painting of the bear.

Oh, with a big nose. With a big nose.

And the head. Here is the eye. Yeah.

This is opening a completely... another point of view

of look into the Turner paintings. Yes.

There are things that I never thought.

No, there are clever, hidden things,

but they have symbolic meaning to Turner,

and he wants to convey them

to the readership, the audience, as well.

Through different anamorphic images,

he creates interest in the painting.

But he never gave it away in his lifetime.

He never said it? No, he didn't let people

see him painting.

Probably because he was doing some of this.

This is quite powerful.

When you look at all these cloths here,

piled up on the boats in the middle of the painting,

there are three heads there.

And in the middle of them...

is an animal's head.

The dark head is a camel's head.

And then we have three Moorish heads.

Right? Ahh.

So there is a meaning of the three Moors

that are near the house of Tintoretto?

Yeah. That is a locational representation of Tintoretto,

cos that's where he worked.

Let me show you this unusual front of a boat here.

You see that shape

and you ask yourself, "What is he doing there?"

My proposal to you

is that that is a representation of Vivaldi.

And here we have a red cello with a neck,

and he even has tuning plugs on it.

Can you see? Completely.

Yeah? So my proposal to you... You agree with that?

You've never seen that before. No, I never know this.

So, Canaletti in the sense of the sons of Venice.

Yes. So it's not only one?

No, there are multiple.

The painting features Venice's prison,

known as "The Leads",

from which the famous Venetian lothario Casanova once escaped.

And Dr Wilkinson thinks Turner

may have referred to this event, too.

But now we go on to another one, another type.

And this is Casanova.

And here, Casanova escaping from The Leads.

He climbed down from the prison.

Yes. Yeah?

And he was met by a gondola that whisked him away.

Here is Casanova sitting, smiling in the gondola

with his feet up.

Oh, fantastic.

I think the other invitation to consider the painting as a riddle

is something that academics have always picked up on

and never really cracked, which is...

..you can see an artist to the left of the canvas,

painting at an easel, but he's painting...

a painting that's already framed,

which of course, no artist ever does.

They may paint a bare canvas unframed.

And so I think this instantly is asking us

to look at the whole painting

as a riddle about painters.

If Turner has called a painting after Canaletto,

why would he NOT depict Canaletto?

Why would the main figure be Titian?

Scientists have taught us to be sceptical.

To the right is a caricature image...

..in profile, of a man's head.

That looks like genitalia to me.

(BOTH LAUGH)

That's not a credible man. (LAUGHS)

With a humongous nose.

Sorry, I'm not mocking you, but...

He could be a cartoon man. He could be a cartoon man.

But why would Turner paint a cartoon man?

Mm. I don't know.

This was the golden age of English caricature.

Mm. I just think he would be a bit more virtuoso about it

if he was going to do that.

You know, that doesn't feel like a credible head.

But that's ME. Everybody's subjective, I think,

and you will see something different than I do.

Nick's thesis

is that some of Turner's references to popular culture,

to pantomime, to caricature,

things that are a kind of litter, references do occur

and he just had that tendency

to try and put a bit of everything in a work.

You don't often spot the litter.

Often you have to look quite hard for it, but it'll be there.

Early on, Turner is doing a lot of work with printmakers,

both in terms of the reproduction of his own work

and in terms...in his earlier youth,

of learning from people who are in the print trade.

Seems to me entirely natural

that Turner would know his print trade inside out

and that an awareness of caricature would be a part of that.

One of the most exciting innovations, I think,

that the satirists pioneered was their use of quite surreal imagery.

They loved hiding images within other images.

Or they loved hiding characters within particular shapes.

That's what's fun about these images -

at one glance you think you've worked it out already,

and then you look a little bit closer

and there's this peculiar, bizarre image that you're looking at.

I think it's exciting that we're looking at Turner

in light of these caricatures.

As you move into the 1830s, 1840s,

to the final couple of decades of his life,

he develops what we call his late style.

And in that late style,

the paintings become more and more indistinct.

The figures and the forms begin to dissolve

and everything becomes dominated

by this...diaphanous sheets of colour and light.

His work evolves constantly

and it just becomes richer and richer.

He becomes very interested in a concept called the sublime,

which is the opposite of beauty.

It's when you see something that terrifies you and you quite enjoy that.

This is a sort of way for him

to start pushing away from visual accuracy

into something new and something different.

CORNELIA: Turner was way ahead of his time,

and his late work was very impressionistic.

Monet and all the Impressionists looked to him

and had been in London and looked at the work.

And so I think he was a catalyst

for that whole era of French Impressionism.

Claude Monet, who came in 1872 to London,

he saw Turner's work and he was forever altered.

And very early in the history of Impressionism,

he and all the other Impressionist artists wrote a letter -

a public open letter - thanking Monsieur Turner

for having paved the way for Impressionism,

and pointing them in the direction of painting light.

Monet spent the rest of his life pretending he'd never written that letter

and pretending that he wasn't absolutely in thrall to Turner.

In his later works in particular,

Turner described his art as indistinct.

"Indistinctness is what I do."

Sort of this wonderful mix of colour and swirl.

And then when you get up close, you can see these little details.

So I think he's being playful there

by suggesting that somehow he is ALWAYS indistinct.

I think anyone who's actually studied Turner's paintings up close

and looked at them, can start to see those little details ping out.

So I think he's both indistinct AND distinct at the same time.

What I think there is... is another way of looking at Turner,

and I think within the context of a single painting,

he uses discreet, sometimes camouflaged, imagery

to enhance the meaning of that single painting.

And it does seem to occur in the later part of Turner's career,

where he's more confident, perhaps,

where he cares less about what people think,

where perhaps he has become more prepared to be playful.

As Turner developed his indistinct style,

he also turned to new, modern topics,

which created a stir.

His contemporaries thought he was a bit strange and he was.

Why would you paint a steam train rushing towards the audience

as if to run them down? This is an amazing thing to paint.

This is something of our time. No-one else is painting it.

Because the Industrial Revolution was such a shocking thing,

nobody painted it. It's like, "don't mention the war".

But Turner DID paint it. He painted smog.

No-one else did that.

And the public does respond, as you can imagine.

They go, "Wow!"

I mean, it's like lobbing a bomb into a gentlemen's club...

..a Turner painting.

I mean, it's this astonishing explosion of light.

If you had to boil down to, as it were,

one sentence, the meaning of rain, steam and speed,

it's saying "this is the modern world".

Here it is, a steam train rushing towards you

across a viaduct, that's blurred by speed.

And all around it,

are these little images and emblems.

There's this little boat.

A road bridge...but no coaches.

There's a hare scampering out of the way. Nature - forget it.

A farmer with his plough and two horses.

But they're like ghosts cos, of course,

ploughs drawn by horses

are soon going to be a thing of the past.

And again, that train...

..roaring towards the future,

roaring into some kind of visionary...

..maelstrom of imagining.

To me, that's Turner.

You know, that's little Turner.

That's what the image is to me.

But Dr Wilkinson thinks this painting

is not just celebrating steam power,

but specifically the man who developed it...

..the engineering genius Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

He had built the new rail infrastructure,

designed railway bridges

and a revolutionary kind of steamship,

the SS Great Britain.

He's painted on the front here - and you can see at the bottom,

below the train, there's a curve there.

And it's actually a red wine bottle that's on the front of the train.

Do you mean the whole front of the train IS a red wine bottle?

Yes. Yeah.

And there is a reason for that.

On the 19th of July, 1843,

Brunel conducted the train,

with Prince Albert on board, to Bristol.

The purpose of the visit was to float out

the greatest marine technology innovation of the day -

the SS Great Britain.

So why is the wine bottle significant?

So, a red wine bottle was used to launch a ship...

..in those days. It wasn't champagne.

The real issue in this painting, though,

is that he has put the SS Great Britain ship in

and it is beneath some waving people.

If you look on the river,

you will see a ghost ship with its prow to the left.

There are six ghostly masts

and the people who wave and draw you into it

we're actually those people at the floating out ceremony.

So, in your interpretation, this is a sort of ghost indication

of the future destination of the train,

which is to the launch of a ship?

Correct. And it's sort of there, floating.

Cos I'd always thought that those figures dancing

somehow might represent the muses or...

It's almost as if Turner's saying, all of that mythology of the past,

that's really fading and fading and fading away

cos the new mythological beast,

the great sort of minotaur of now, is the steam train.

So it's a bit of a different interpretation.

The steam train has been trumped by the SS Great Britain.

Well, I mean, I think...

You know, I personally think the train's enough.

But...you know, I mean, you know, it's interesting.

It's the sort of theory that can't be denied

because what you're seeing, or claiming to see,

is, you know, a persuasive intellectual pattern.

Whether it's REALLY there, we'd have to get Turner

out from the grave and say, "Is he right?"

And whether he'd tell us the truth anyway, how do we know?

I do feel the idea that the painting is a homage to Brunel...

..I find that entirely persuasive.

Whether it's a red wine bottle, whether there is a ghost ship,

I'm not...you know, I can't say I'm sure.

I can't say. "Yes, I agree. I see it.

I can understand the meaning."

But you've clearly done your research.

(TRAIN WHISTLE TOOTS)

Of course, Turner was travelling around Britain

and his journeys were absolutely transformed

by the arrival of the trains and the railways,

and that enabled him to travel to different parts of the country

in ways that he hadn't done before.

Turner was born in the late 18th century,

when the only modes of transport would have been horse and horseback.

The Firefly so brilliantly depicted in Turner's painting

would have been absolutely revolutionary.

The iron horse had replaced the horse,

and the Iron horse was the Firefly locomotive,

capable of reaching these extraordinary speeds

and in fact, shrinking the entire country

to what he would have grown up with as a child and as a young man.

(STEAM ENGINE HISSES)

(WHISTLE TOOTS)

(STEAM HISSES)

Well, Rob, thanks for joining us here on the platform

in front of a fantastic steam engine.

It IS beautiful. Historic steam engine.

No matter how many times I see it,

it always makes me smile when I come past this Firefly loco.

Magnificent. Yeah. I wanted to just run past you

some images that we've found in a painting by Turner

called Rain Steam And Speed. Lovely.

There are some strange images around the front of the train here.

Bright-coloured... People think it's a fire box,

but you can see the fire box is HERE.

That should be the front of the boiler.

Yeah. And something strange hanging off the side of the train here.

This looks like the head of a man.

It's a nose and so on.

And he's looking down at the bridge as if to inspect.

So what's the thinking here? That this could be Brunel himself

coming across, inspecting his handiwork,

inspecting his... his controversial design,

but knowing that he was right?

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean...I love that.

And it is exactly... From what I know about Brunel,

it's the kind of thing that he would probably love to do -

go out inspecting the beauty of his work.

Another image associated with the front of the train.

There are some lines coming down here

and then you follow them up

and it comes to the neck of a bottle and the top of a bottle.

It looks almost like a wine bottle.

OK. Can you see?

Yeah, I can see that now,

with the chimney being the neck of the bottle.

Yeah. On the opening. The chimney of the loco.

Yeah. Right. OK.

What are we suggesting here?

Brunel wasn't an alcoholic as far as I know.

No. We're suggesting that this might be a wine bottle

travelling on... in the direction of Bristol.

Let's try another one.

If you look down the side of the train,

it's arranged rather as if it's a banqueting table.

Can you see that at all?

Looking along that perspective? Yeah.

With dinner plates as wheels along here?

Yeah, yeah. OK.

Yeah? I can see that. Yeah.

A man with sideburns and a bald pate

looking down as if Brunel is having a banquet...

Mm. ..which he did many times.

He used it as his influencing method.

Yeah, I can see...

That's the clearest one you've shown me so far, I think.

I can see that very, very clearly.

Can I say about that as well... Yeah. Please.

Because of the style of the rest of the painting,

and the locomotive and the carriages behind,

there's not that much detail,

but it does strike me

that those wheels - or dinner plates, perhaps -

are quite well defined, which you wouldn't expect in the style of the painting.

So there's something slightly at odds there, I'd say.

It's quite extraordinary because that painting's so well known.

It's, you know, one of Turner's masterpieces.

And to think that thousands - or millions - of people

have looked at that painting and not seen that hidden imagery

is quite extraordinary, especially as it's an homage to Brunel,

that Brunel himself is hidden in that painting.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was probably one of the most influential

and revolutionary engineers that Britain's ever had.

To think that he himself is hidden in that painting is extraordinary.

He's there in the foreground, conducting that train,

you know, going towards Bristol,

where the SS Great Britain is being launched, you know,

the greatest ship of all time at that time.

It's these dancing people on the banks of the Thames.

Beneath them on the river...

..there is...

floating, a big boat with six masts.

It could be. My eyesight is not as good as yours.

So it could be the SS Great Britain.

Could he be painting here, the floating out day?

Is certainly... It's certainly possible.

Whether or not... One thing we don't know is whether Turner was there.

It was widely reported in the papers of the time,

so he would have known about that.

And the people waving on the banks of the River Thames here...

if you look directly beneath them,

you will see what I term a "ghost ship".

And it's got six masts.

Can you see it at all?

I mean...

yes.

It's interesting. For me, the challenge is that

I think of Turner as such a...

He was a kind of pre-impressionistic painter and a romantic painter.

And so I think of his work as so gestural

and so much about a kind of immediacy in his mark-making,

that, you know, the idea that there's this

other image in there is a challenge.

But then when I look at the figures and the way that they're reproduced,

I mean, I can see a form there

and, to me, it looks a little bit more like a fish.

These dancing people on the bank

and beneath them is a ghost ship with six masts.

It looks like it is, for me...

It looks like it is a representation

of some ships that are, you know, on the river...

and there's figures above them.

But I don't... I don't see that as a HIDDEN thing.

I think it's quite visible.

Wow. Really? OK. Yeah.

The idea of having different time frames in one painting,

I find interesting.

The boat's there but it's in plain sight.

You know, he added those kind of details.

That's what was a bit of his trademark,

really, to come in and whack a few people into a painting.

This is, of course, what Turner always said was his speciality,

being indistinct, making people look,

inviting people to ask whether stuff is there or perhaps it's not.

Again, I think this is part of a game

where nothing is entirely clear

because of the complexity of the world.

A group that was long considered to perhaps be...dancing nymphs,

Nick has now proposed

that those are actually people waving off the SS Great Britain.

And, yes, actually, if you look carefully,

indistinct, there is a ship

perhaps a little bit like the SS Great Britain.

And I think the key to all this is "indistinct".

These aren't images that Turner wants to...

be projecting forcefully from the paintings.

They're things that sort of come through the mist...

the longer you look at them and contemplate them.

I think it's really important

we look closely at pictures

and especially with great artists like Turner,

we will always find new things if we look.

Over the last ten years or so, a number of studies have examined

how long most members of the public

spend looking at individual paintings in galleries.

The results are pretty extraordinary.

What they found is that the average person spends

25 seconds looking at a given painting.

Now, that really isn't a lot. If you compare it...

We dedicate three minutes of our time to a pop song,

40 minutes to a symphony, two hours to a film,

two or three weeks to a novel, but only 25 seconds to a painting.

And that means that we're really not looking at great works of art

for long enough to absorb them,

and certainly not looking at them long enough

to discover new things about them.

I think if you DO look at paintings more closely

and you take your time, you can discover extraordinary things.

There were no galleries in the past.

If you wanted to see a painting,

you would have to go to someone's house

and you would go and inspect the paintings

and you would spend time doing that.

You wouldn't look at them for 60 seconds and walk on,

which is what we do now.

I also think people aren't confident looking at paintings.

When we go into a gallery, we're very often looking for guidance.

And I think it takes a lot of courage

to actually say what YOU see,

regardless of what you're being TOLD to see.

I think it's also important that a broader range

of perspectives is brought to the history of art.

It shouldn't just be established art historians and curators looking at works of art,

but sometimes people from a very different background

can see things and notice things that other people haven't noticed.

So I think that what Nick Wilkinson has found is fascinating.

I think he's clearly looked very deeply

and very carefully at these paintings.

And it may well be that some of the things he's discovered are...

were intended by Turner,

but it's also possible that none of them were intended by Turner

and those things have been placed there by Nick

in his own determination to find those symbols.

What's brilliant about Nick is he's just come from left of field

and anyone who comes from left of field, there's a shock

and you think, "Really? Can this possibly be true?

Could we have missed all this for sure?"

I think he is controversial...

..and a lot of people won't want to see that.

Whether you agree or not, it's up to you.

But at least we can have a nice debate about it.

In 1822, Turner painted The Battle Of Trafalgar

celebrating Admiral Lord Nelson's triumph

over Napoleon's warships in 1805.

The painting shows Nelson's ship the Victory

sending out a signal flag saying "every man will do his duty".

But it also contains symbols relating to Nelson himself,

who died in the battle.

One of the paintings that Nick has really focused on

that I DO find really intriguing,

is Turner's painting of The Battle Of Trafalgar,

cos that has always been

just a weird painting in Turner's repertoire.

It's an odd painting, full stop.

The Battle Of Trafalgar is a very strange painting.

It's not really a very Turnerian picture

because although it's magnificent and highly accomplished,

and full of extraordinary detail, it's quite static.

And of course, like so many of Turner's pictures,

it is filled with symbols -

a flag spelling out the word "duty"

and Nelson's motto hidden beneath the water.

It's a strange, bizarre painting,

and I've never really understood why it was static,

why the sails were so Baroque.

All sorts of things.

And in a way, Nick's findings have really helped.

This is Turner's only royal commission.

Commissioned by George IV.

And it's got a low perspective

with Victory centre stage, looming large.

In the foreground, you've got a scene of the chaos of battle

and death - drowning sailors.

It's already loaded with imagery.

Does the falling mast indicate the death of Nelson?

His signal flag is still flying there.

"England expects every man to do its duty."

So he's really hammering home the patriotic.

The Wilkinsons think that there are many more images

than have been spotted so far...

and also ones that tell a bigger story about Nelson himself.

I want to go through some hidden images

and just get your reaction to that, really.

There is a dark falling sail.

That sail has the form of a death mask.

Could well represent the death mask of Nelson.

There's a rather strange triangular bicorne hat.

And then, finally, there is a skull wearing a coronet

of the kind that you find in the Order Of The Bath.

It's a sort of cone-shaped coronet.

What we suggest is that these are all tokens of Nelson's death.

I think if the falling foremast is often thought

to represent Nelson himself falling to the deck,

then there's a degree of sense

that those elements would be further down from the mast.

I can certainly see the bicorne hat.

I hadn't noticed that at all.

Certainly there's a connection

between the traditional interpretation of the painting

and what appear to be some hidden forms.

Nelson was a celebrity,

his love life in the public eye.

Famously, he had a mistress, Emma Hamilton,

while still married.

If you look at the correspondence...

..between Nelson and Emma Hamilton,

they referred to his wife,

Frances Nisbet, as a..."Tom Tit".

Right. Right?

If you look at the prow of the Victory...

..and the way that sail's...

very neatly curved round...

Oh, yes. There's an eye and there's a beak.

Yep.

A bird, a tom tit.

They called her a tom tit because she had rheumatism.

She moved around erratically.

That's why they did it. It was rather harsh and unkind.

How do you feel about that?

Well, it's a lot to take in.

In what's a familiar...

familiar painting,

why insert these additional meanings?

If you look - and it's best to see it from a distance -

you see the sea form forms the bosom of a lady.

And then there is a face

looking out at you

with a particularly prominent eye...

..and her chin here.

And she's got a white sheet behind her.

This, we suggest, is Emma Hamilton.

Ah. OK?

HMS Victory,

which is behind us here now. It is.

Pristine condition.

But I'm gonna draw you to the foreground here.

Floating in the sea here,

supine in the sea, looking upwards...

in death,

we propose, is the head of Nelson.

Oh, yes, I've got it now. Yes. It's there, isn't it?

I can see his nose quite clearly and grey features.

Very appropriate for somebody who's dead, I suppose.

Isn't that incredible? Yeah.

That your relative, Turner,

has painted the dead Nelson

supporting the British nation after his death at the battle?

Yes, it's remarkable.

I'm assuming he intended to do that

and it's not an optical illusion, basically.

Dr Wilkinson thinks the figure of Nelson in the sea

may refer to Nelson's funeral,

where his coffin was placed in a model of the Victory.

I don't see that there.

It's not convincing to me at all.

I understand the imagery in the painting,

but then I don't buy that particularly,

because I think it's too disruptive

of the coherence of the original image.

So I don't see why he would then, you know, over-egg it a bit.

You told me there were death masks and yes, I can see them.

In the context of what this painting was trying to achieve

by somehow embodying the life of Nelson,

I'm prepared to buy it.

There is already, in the sort of academic field,

some sort of understanding that there are hidden messages.

But, yeah, it was only when I looked through YOUR eyes

I saw this very strange composition at the bottom.

You know, you do see a face lying in state,

and I had never considered that.

It's here. His hair is sort of floating off.

Is this his mouth? That's his mouth. Yeah.

I think it's a bit of caricature. I don't know if that's a face.

But don't you think you could take any painting

and zoom in on it and find faces?

I mean, I used to do this as a child.

We had very... I lived in a 400-year-old cottage

and it had very bumpy walls and was very badly painted.

I remember I used to have to count 50 faces before I fell asleep.

The tendency to perceive images or objects

where they don't exist is known as pareidolia.

Pareidolia is a strange name,

but it actually describes something we all do every day.

It describes the way we see images in things.

So every time you look up to the clouds

and you see a face in the clouds, or you see a face in your coffee,

that is a pareidolia.

Probably the best known example of pareidolia is the Man in the Moon.

We look at the moon and we think that we see,

in the distant craters, a human face.

My viewing experience of something will be informed by what I know.

Your viewing experience of something will be informed by what YOU know.

Many people think that the famous cave paintings

that you find in the Upper Paleolithic

are also themselves pareidolia,

and that the artists that made those images

weren't simply putting images onto the cave walls

but were seeing images

in the shapes and the shadows of the cave walls.

Renaissance artists exploited pareidolic effects.

Correggio shows a nymph embraced by a cloudy Jupiter.

Mantegna's sky features heavenly faces.

Accidental things can occur in the making of works of art,

which artists then embrace.

It could be that it began as an accident,

and it was then something that he tweaked

in order to make it appear more intentional.

I think it's highly likely that that was part of his process

of producing these hidden images,

and we know that that is an established form for producing art,

which dates back to...

The earliest account we have is in 11th-century China.

In Turner's day, he and other landscape painters

were taught using an inkblot technique...

which encouraged them to find imaginary scenes in wet paint.

OK, so in terms of watercolour...

..and what you might call the inkblot technique,

Turner would have used...

Obviously, he was a great master of watercolour.

In his later years, when he was very free

and loose with his application - especially with watercolour...

it would...he would flood it on with a brush like this.

So it's often thought

that he might simply start something like this

and then develop a watercolour

from the suggestive properties of the blotch.

And, of course, this was something that...

uh...

is mentioned...

Leonardo da Vinci mentions this as a way of generating imagery

and as a way of understanding the natural world.

So he would advise his pupils to... to look at...

..stains on walls...

as a way of emulating

the kind of

shapes and forms that that happened in nature.

So we might sort of suddenly think, "OK, well, there's a bit of,

perhaps, a horizon line... developing here."

And this is entirely speculative what I'm doing.

I'm just following my nose a bit

and reacting to what I see in front of me.

What these blots and blotches might suggest.

What Turner is such a master at

is being responsive to his medium...

..and working within the limits of it,

but pushing the limits as well.

He did everything in spades that they pretend

the artists on the Turner Prize shortlist are doing every year.

But that kind of idea of an artist as someone

pushing the boundaries, somebody making you see the world afresh,

it didn't exist in Victorian England.

In Victorian England, the job of the artist was to paint myself,

my wife, my horse, my dog, my country estate.

Maybe paint a bit of mythology.

The idea that you'd paint the meaning of the universe -

because that's Turner's subject,

he is actually taking on the meaning of the universe.

He's pushing towards the point that Einstein reaches

considerably later - namely the idea that somehow, in light,

in the perception of light,

the secrets of the universe lie encoded.

Artists have long tried to give multiple dimensions to their work.

17th-century painters made landscapes

that transformed into people.

And perhaps some of Turner's landscapes conceal people, too.

Does his painting of St Catherine's Hill in Guildford

hide a head and shoulders of the saint?

If you track through the history of art,

what you find is that this idea of hidden images

is a fundamental part of the history of art.

Whether it's these distorted skulls in the backgrounds of Renaissance vanitas paintings,

whether it's the double images of Salvador Dali and the surrealists,

the idea of disguising

and putting images secretly into other images

is a fundamental technique in the history of art.

It's a very fascinating territory.

The whole beauty of them is they're hidden.

Probably one of the best-known examples

in a British public collection

is in Holbein's Painting The Ambassadors,

which is in the National Gallery in London.

This is a full-length, full-sized portrait

of two French ambassadors to the Court of Henry VIII.

The Ambassadors is famous for its hidden symbolism.

And it's famous above all for this anamorphic skull,

this...stretched skull,

that when you look at the painting straight on,

you just think, "What's that mark at the bottom of the canvas?"

But when you actually go round to the side

and you look at the painting down,

or when you go to the other side and look at it up,

that whole "smear", if you like,

condenses into a perfect painting of a skull.

So that's a classic example

of an artist hiding symbols in plain sight.

The idea of hiding imagery in paintings

was very well established.

But as a young man, Turner lived in Maiden Lane.

The area was full of theatres and print shops

and places where he would have seen satirical images,

often had concealed anthropomorphic images within them.

So all of this is in Turner's kind of visual vocabulary

from a very early stage.

I think it's entirely plausible that he would have continued

to deploy those techniques throughout his career.

And the other thing, I think, that anybody knows

from having discovered a hidden or anthropomorphic image

is that when we DO notice these things,

they have a very profound

and memorable effect on our consciousness.

I can see why he would have used this technique

to make a political statement.

And Turner DID make political statements.

In his painting entitled Slave Ship,

Slavers Throwing Overboard The Dead And Dying - Typhon Coming On...

..he shows the practice of offloading human cargo

as a storm approaches.

You look at it and you go into the painting.

It doesn't come out to you. You have to go into it to find it.

And that's what I love about it as a work of art.

Now, the story it tells is quite dreadful.

These were people methodically thrown overboard over three days.

142 lives. Men, women and children were thrown into the sea.

Apparently, one of them actually made it back...

such was his will to live.

The painting immortalised the 1781 Zong Massacre.

The ship was sailing to Jamaica.

Beneath the deck, over 400 suffocating human beings

were being held captive in horrific conditions.

These ships were not designed to carry so many people

who would have been having less than a coffin space to circulate in.

Some figures go up to 470,

and maybe we won't ever really fully know,

simply because the records are incomplete.

There was a so-called slave ship.

They set out en route to Jamaica,

but due to miscalculations,

they passed Jamaica

and they began to run out of food, water.

The ship captain - somebody called Luke Collingwood -

orders the crew to throw overboard...

the surplus Africans.

Just even talking about it is really difficult.

For many of those who were trying to stop slavery,

including abolitionists - and African abolitionists -

the way in which they were able to impact social consciousness

and to change and transform hearts and minds

was through works of art

that we don't often see as having a political value.

But they would have had such a political impact.

But here's the thing. I think that this painting is being seen

as Turner having a bit of guilt.

He'd invested in a share in a sugar plantation in Jamaica.

So he was part of the transatlantic slave trade movement,

but at the same time was able to kind of see the horror

and the barbaric nature of this practice.

So, in a way, it's like his painting speaks

to his kind of personal guilt,

but also speaks to the activism, or the activist, in him as well.

With this painting, Turner was compelling people

to campaign with the abolitionists.

Dr Wilkinson has identified new images concealed in the work

that speak further to Turner's abhorrence of slavery

and his own sense of personal guilt.

The first image that you find in here is a large, quite diffuse one.

What you see on the left side,

the storm coming in to overtake the slave traders,

is an image of Zeus himself...

..using his trademark thunderbolt.

Can you see that image?

I can.

What this painting conveys is how Turner is totally going against

what becomes rationalisations for enslavement.

That it was legal,

that somehow it was acceptable.

And clearly, for Turner to be painting this,

he's really trying to convey that underbelly...

..that is not spoken

and really flying in the face of all of the rationalisations

and the justifications that continue to this day.

And it brings, I think, a whole new sort of level...

in terms of analysing what's in this painting

and what messages he was conveying for the times,

but also timeless messages.

It looks like we've got a god here

throwing in thunderbolts at the slave traders.

What do you think about that?

You can see there IS something there.

There's something...big,

powerful, dramatic, rising out of the sea.

But they're only there because you told me.

I know there's something there and I can guess...

I can see where you're coming from.

Turner has put some powerful image there,

some monumental image.

Whether it's Zeus, I don't fully resolve it.

But I can see...essentially intense,

the intent of something overbearing about to descend on the ship.

But could the figure in the clouds

also refer to a famous poem about guilt?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime Of The Ancient Mariner.

It relates how, when a sailor shot an albatross,

his ship was becalmed...

..idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean...

under a hot and copper sky.

The crew died of thirst.

Their souls sucked up into a creature in the sky

called Life In Death.

Nick's observations about Turner's use of pareidolia imagery,

imagery concealed in clouds, or mountains, or sails,

made me think about The Slave Ship again and look at the clouds.

And for the first time,

I could see a figure in the clouds, hovering above the ship.

And that was consistent with two things that the painting references.

It's consistent, in my view, that there might be a reference

to the Ancient Mariner.

And when I went back

and read that poem through Nick's lens,

I indeed could see a lot of imagery in that painting

that seemed to relate to the poem as well.

And with good cause,

because that poem does speak

to the death of people on board a ship,

to their souls, rising...

this figure Life In Death who sucked up souls towards her.

But the title also talks about Typhon...

..who is a mythological monster

who has a great battle with Zeus.

He loved those great sort of mythological battles

between good and evil.

By 1846, Turner meets Sophia Booth,

and they take a little cottage in Chelsea.

This becomes a place that's really Turner's private world,

and he's known locally as Admiral Booth or Mr Booth,

so he's adopted HER surname to really hide from the world

and just be the man he wants to be

when he's not being The Great Turner.

Towards the end of his life, when his health started to decline,

he found this house on the river in Chelsea.

What he liked about it was it had this secluded terrace

where he could paint the sky but not be seen by the public.

By this stage, Turner was an absolute wreck of a man.

He stank. He was dishevelled.

He was anonymous.

People didn't really know who he was.

His neighbours didn't really know him.

They thought he was a sea captain or something.

He took her name because he didn't want to be known

as Turner, the great painter.

So he called himself "Puggy"

cos he's only four foot nothing, as we all know.

So when he did sit with the guys

or the dockers or the sailors, he would say, "I'm Puggy."

He was a very secretive man.

Turner and Sophia Booth stayed together for the rest of his life.

It's a relationship that lasts nearly 20 years,

and he actually dies at their cottage in Chelsea in 1851.

One of the things I love about Turner

is actually he donated all of his paintings,

all of his works, to this nation.

It's unusual for Turner to have left all his work to the nation,

but it was a very clever thing for him to have done.

Part of the reasons why he has endured, really.

It still remains, I think, the biggest single artist bequest

to a British institution.

His legacy is absolutely extraordinary.

I think he remains the greatest British painter of all time

and his name is still remembered.

Think of the Turner Prize, which is still going.

The Turner Prize began in 1984

to celebrate the most compelling contemporary visual art.

It's become associated with a kind of radicalism,

and Turner himself was associated with a kind of radicalism.

It's deliberately named after Turner because many people

consider him to be the first modern British painter.

Turner invented the idea of the artist

as someone who challenges,

you know, if you wanted to be really radical as an artist now,

you'd be utterly conventional because no-one else is doing that.

Is there a Turner code?

Nick is suggesting that some images skip across paintings.

Bears...geese.

Is that a code?

Maybe. If it's a code, it's a slightly indistinct code

in a way that only Turner could provide an indistinct code.

I think he's keeping us guessing.

ERICA: The Turner code signifies an enhanced way

of looking at and analysing Turner's paintings.

NICK: First of all, the fairly high intensity recurrence

of personal emblems - the bear's head

and a floating head with a large nose, almost caricature like.

And we find this recurring across paintings.

Do you think that there could be a Turner code?

It could be.

It could be... because he was a genius.

I'm not denying that there are other narratives

going on in some of these paintings. You can see that.

Where you have these images appearing

and they're enigmatic and fugitive.

You know, he painted these things for a reason

and I can see that you are hunting after those reasons.

Once you realise he's got this ability to paint miniatures,

you will find about 200 of them.

The curators have been looking at these pictures

for a couple of hundred years and haven't actually spotted it.

Neither have the public. But it's an addition.

Is not a criticism that people haven't seen it before.

They haven't had the machinery to see it before.

It's hard to be sure that Turner would have intended people

to have seen them, because I think some of them are so vague.

It's also not impossible that he would have left

a trail of clues in his work.

I think, as we begin to look again at these works

with Nick's images in mind, I'm sure we'll come up with

some slightly different interpretations.

Or perhaps there will be a degree of incredulity.

I don't know. We'll need to see how the things pan out.

I think, if people are being encouraged to look again,

look more closely at Turner...

..see things that perhaps they haven't been seen before,

then clearly there will be an interest

to come and view this great work.

Some of them I can see, and some of them I can't see.

I find the idea that Turner would include...

..little secret images and symbols...

in a certain hidden graphic language...

I don't find that totally surprising at all

because I think he was a man with secret meanings.

I think that the way that you're looking

and thinking about Turner's work,

whether those images are in there or not,

is the way that I think we should look at art.

And I think it's the way artists want us to look at art,

because I think it's about, you know,

trying to find the clues and trying to find

what's in the painting, what's in the image.

And, of course, you can bring scholarship and knowledge

and all of these other disciplines to it,

but you should always return to the painting.

And if these things are starting to come out,

I also don't think it's a leap of the imagination

to imagine that Turner would be

playing with all these different codes.

Well, I've made the leap,

and it's taken 200 years to get there on a lot of this,

so we'll see how it's received.

AccessibleCustomerService@sky.uk