Original subtitles

JMW Turner is widely regarded as the greatest artist that Britain has ever produced.

When Turner was asked the secret of his success and the secret of his genius, he said,

I have no secret except damned hard work.

And he is one of the most prolific artists, not just in British history, but in the history of art.

But it isn't just quantity through which Turner's life should be measured.

There's a vision in Turner that is unsurpassed in British art.

He took landscape painting into new territories, using paint in magical ways

which captured the wildness of the natural world around him,

but which bordered on abstraction.

Today we venerate his seemingly unruly brushstrokes,

but in the 19th century they caused an outrage.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in 1775

above his father's barber's shop in London's bustling Covent Garden.

It was a time of great change for Britain,

which was in the process of an industrial revolution.

The mass production of goods created new wealth,

but also brought with it a deeper division in class.

Turner escaped the poverty trap by drawing.

He had a precocious talent for drawing as well as marketing his art from a very young age.

At the age of nine, he copied illustrations from cheap publications

and sold them to clients at his father's salon.

At 13 he was apprenticed to Thomas Moulton,

a watercolourist specialising in architectural scenes.

But his most important professional training came from a new and illustrious institution

that would change the face of British art.

The art world into which Turner was born in Britain was going through exciting times.

Seven years before his birth, in 1768, the Royal Academy of Arts was founded

by a group of artists, sculptors and architects led by Sir Joshua Reynolds

and including some of the future stars of British art like Thomas Gainsborough.

Tuition at the academy was free.

The whole purpose of the institution was both to promote British art by exhibiting art,

but also by training young artists.

And Turner came here at the age of 14 and began what was going to become a long association

between him and the academy.

Now, the basic craft of painting was learnt in the day.

Artists would be apprentices and work in artist studios,

or in Turner's case, in that of an architectural draughtsman.

But in the evenings, they learnt much more of the intellectual discipline

of what it was to be an artist.

The education centred around philosophy, history, contemporary science,

with a focus mainly on the human body.

Students drew, and boy did they draw.

In the main, from the human body itself, but perhaps above all,

from plaster casts of idealised classical sculptures.

The academy was unashamedly hierarchical.

Reynolds established a list of important subject matters in painting

that started with history, and right at the bottom was landscape.

But Turner had begun to develop what became a lifelong love of landscape painting.

And he'd also begun to gain a reputation as a talented watercolourist

specialising in topographical and architectural pictures.

At 15, he had his first watercolour, the Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth,

chosen for the highly competitive exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1790,

an astonishing achievement for an adolescent.

Although it was at the bottom of the art establishment's hierarchy of high art,

landscape painting became more fashionable among the art-buying public,

as travel became increasingly popular.

The pictures that Turner produced were often made into engravings,

which were then sold as prints, or published in the new literary phenomenon,

travel guides.

As well as having strong views about what to paint,

the Academy also told artists about how to paint.

And the academic view was unequivocal.

The most talented artists used oil.

But I think Turner's real artistic laboratory was the art of the watercolour.

Now, we recognised Turner's reputation mainly through his oils.

They're wonderful achievements.

But during his lifetime, it was the watercolour that spread his reputation,

because he was prolific.

He produced over 1,800 finished watercolours,

as well as thousands of unfinished sketches.

Now, for the Academy, the watercolour was inferior to oil painting.

But for a rising artistic public, the watercolour was a wonderful popular medium.

It was spontaneous, it was easy to do.

You could take your watercolour box, as Turner did,

out wherever you were to make sketches.

But also, modern science was producing a different kind of colour.

Most people used previously, to the 18th century,

pigments that were produced from earth.

These were earth colours and slightly muted.

But synthetic colour production of pigment meant that colour could go wild.

And Turner, ever the experimentalist, took up the challenge.

Still in his teens, Turner embarked on a series of journeys around the country,

filling his sketchbooks and making detailed notes describing the weather,

light and colour of the landscapes and sky.

He'd bring his ideas back to his studio to work up into watercolours and then oils,

with which he'd just started to experiment.

But it was a tour of the Isle of Wight when he was 20,

which provided him with the inspiration to produce his first major oil painting.

Fisherman at Sea was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1796.

Turner had only just started using oils three years before,

so it's a remarkably accomplished work.

The technique here is unlike that used in his watercolours of the period,

but it shows elements that were to become more pronounced in his later works.

First, the subject matter.

Turner maintained a lifelong fascination with the frailty of man

when subjected to the power and immensity of nature.

And then, secondly, there's the attention to the qualities of light.

The white of the moon overshadows the orange of the fisherman's lamp

and becomes something of a subject in its own right.

Finally, the composition seeks to heighten the sense of drama

by drawing us into the vortex-like painting.

And all the simmering power and technical accomplishment

that Turner showed in a fisherman at sea explodes into life in paintings like this one.

This was exhibited in 1805 and it's called Shipwreck.

Now, we don't know whether Turner actually was referring to a real shipwreck

or even to a poem that had been published the year before by William Faulkner.

But what we do know is that he's empathising physically

as well as creatively and with his imagination

with the plight of these figures as they're sucked down into the vortex

as the sea explodes all around them.

It's the equivalent of a disaster movie.

We empathise with the little man, but the best thing about the painting

is the way that Turner, using this vigorous brush with white foam,

creates the sense of a swirling, enveloping sea.

Now, at the beginning of the 19th century,

the most popular and influential philosophical book around

had been written a few decades before by Edmund Burke

and explored the nature of the sublime.

And in this painting,

Turner too is exploring the nature of the sublime.

That awestruck, terror-inspiring feeling

when man is confronted by nature

and realises that he's quite literally that big.

And it's a painting that your eyes can never be still when they look at.

We're drawn all over it.

And it set the tone in many ways

for a lot of Turner's later work.

These pulsating oil paintings made it abundantly clear

that Turner wasn't just a watercolourist.

He wanted to show the Academy

that he was capable of producing impressive works in oil too.

And over the next 50 years,

he showed an oil painting in every annual Royal Academy exhibition.

At the age of 26,

Turner had achieved what for many artists

became their greatest professional desire,

the election as a full member of the Academy.

This was a prestigious and privileged position to be in,

not least because he could exhibit works

on the hallowed walls of the Academy

without fear of rejection by the dreaded hanging committee.

Turner was therefore established as a major British artist,

but his ambition extended well beyond the confines of the British Isles.

1802 was an exciting year for Turner.

A lull in the Napoleonic Wars in Europe

meant that he could travel abroad for the first time

and see the landscapes of France and Switzerland.

Napoleon's improvements to the mountain roads

meant that the Alps were now easier to navigate.

Turner used this to his advantage,

filling his sketchbooks with over 400 drawings

of the magnificent alpine scenery.

The books were then used as a personal reference library

for his numerous watercolours and oils.

Turner benefited from the great commander's deeds in another way too.

Napoleon had plundered the wealth of various European countries

and furnished the Louvre in Paris

with new paintings and other valuable treasures.

Turner was able to see these new additions for himself.

To an English artist, still without a national gallery,

the impact of viewing such a collection can't be underestimated.

And Turner was awestruck,

most significantly by the works of Claude Lorraine,

the great 17th century French landscape painter,

who was to inspire him throughout his life.

Invigorated by his travels,

Turner continued to plough his energies

into his prolific landscape painting.

But as a prominent member of the Royal Academy,

he was well aware of the importance of history painting.

His solution? To bring the two together.

And perhaps nowhere is the fusion of landscape and history

more powerfully evoked than in this painting,

first shown in 1812,

and called Snowstorm,

Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps.

Turner takes as a starting point

one of the great, heroic, mythologised journeys in history.

The Carthaginian general, Hannibal,

taking his army up through Spain

with a cortege of elephants too,

over the Alps, into Italy,

where they inflict a series of defeats on the Romans no less,

but finally are defeated and driven back to Carthage.

And what we see is a moment where Hannibal is crossing the Alps.

We can see the silhouette of an elephant there,

but we're also seeing the rear part of the army,

the baggage carriers, being picked off by Swiss tribes.

And so there's this horrendous violence

being inflicted by one part of humanity on another.

But where is the greatest threat of violence?

Well, clearly, it's through nature, and it's the storm itself.

And if you just think of the title,

he doesn't call it Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps in a snowstorm.

He says, Snowstorm, Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps.

And in fact, just in sheer percentages,

less than a quarter of the painting itself deals with Hannibal and the army,

and the rest is this swollen, angry sky,

with the sun just flickering through.

Turner continued to explore the theme

of the classical Carthaginian Empire in other works,

but in contrast to the apocalyptic scenes of Hannibal,

he turned his attentions to the master

of the idealised classical landscape, Claude Lorraine.

The most famous of all Turner's paintings influenced by Claude

is probably this one, Dido building Carthage,

painted around 1815,

and full of wonderful topographical detail

and great classical buildings,

an indication that Turner's imagination is really burgeoning.

It's a scene from an epic poem by the Roman poet Virgil,

about the building of Carthage by Queen Dido.

People looking at this painting in 1815

would have been well-versed in Virgil's poetry,

and Turner's wearing his own education on his sleeve here.

The sun, right at the heart of the painting, irradiates everything,

a dazzling example of Turner's obsession with the power of nature.

So even as this man-made empire is beginning,

natural forces dominate over all.

But I think there's also a hint here

of what I might call the classical sublime.

In other words,

Turner's awe when looking at human achievements

and when looking at history itself.

At least partly inspired by Claude's classical paintings,

Turner went to Italy for the first time in 1819.

Like so many artists before him,

he went in search of history

and the art and architecture of the Italian masters.

He travelled to Florence, Rome and then to Venice,

where he was captivated by the optical dazzle

of the city's canals and lagoons.

For someone used to grey, cold and foggy London,

it was a shock to the system

and it was to give him a new momentum in his painting.

In 1832,

Turner made a second trip to Venice

that fuelled his imagination

and set the tone for the rest of the decade.

He went all over the city armed with his sketchbooks,

sometimes working in ink

and often using watercolours to lay in scenes.

And he made an image right here where I'm standing

which he showed at the Royal Academy in 1833

which looks across the lagoon,

depicts all the famous architecture,

the Campanile, St Mark's Square, the Bridge of Sighs

and he looks intently at the play of the sun on the water

and the dazzling colours around the place.

But he also depicts a man painting at his easel,

staring at this wall and this is Canaletto,

the most celebrated painter of Venice.

And in a way, what Turner's trying to do, I think,

with a little wry smile on his face perhaps,

is establish himself as the new master of painting the city.

.

Although Italy became a major source of inspiration

throughout the rest of his life,

images of Britain continued to dominate Turner's canvases.

He became a chronicler of contemporary history in 1834

when he produced stunning images

of the burning of the Houses of Parliament.

Turner had rushed to the scene, along with hundreds of others,

to see the inferno on the banks of the Thames.

Rather like using a camera,

he made many hurried pencil sketches and watercolours,

like this one,

which were worked up into two blazing oil paintings soon after.

When Turner arrived to display one of the oils at the British Institution,

an alternative to the Royal Academy,

the painting was clearly unfinished.

It was, a fellow painter recalled,

a mere dab of several colours without form or void,

like chaos before the creation.

It was a common practice, both at the Royal Academy and the British Institution,

to have three days before the exhibition,

where painters could make last-minute alterations to their work.

This was called Varnishing Day,

and famously,

Turner used the time, not to touch up his work,

but often to paint entire canvases almost from scratch.

As he grew older,

Turner developed a reputation as an introverted, scruffy eccentric.

Despite his wealth, he never spent money on luxuries.

He never married, and he had few friends.

In the final years of his life,

he moved to a house in Chelsea overlooking the river,

where he tried to live in relative anonymity.

But even though he lacked the social graces

that were expected in Regency in Victorian England,

he was warmly accepted by patrons.

The critics, though, were another matter.

His technique and use of paint in his late works

were likened to custard, coal dust, cream,

and perhaps most infamously, to soap suds and whitewash,

a comment made about one of Turner's radical late oil paintings

exhibited in 1842.

Aside from being one of Turner's more iconic and outlandish works,

it also has the longest title in the history of art.

It's called Snowstorm.

Steamboat off a harbour's mouth,

making signals in shallow water and going by the lead.

The author was in the storm on the night the aerial left Harwich.

Now, what we get from that is that Turner himself

is claiming to have been lashed to the mast on this boat

in this particular snowstorm.

And, in fact, he claimed that to have happened,

but art historians have searched high and low,

and no one can find any record of a boat called the Aerial leaving Harwich,

and it's led some people to assume that Turner is making this up.

But there is also the added fact that he's 67 at the time,

and the idea of a man of that age strapping himself to a mast,

exposing himself to the elements for hours,

is perhaps a tad far-fetched.

Nonetheless, it shows us what Turner's real aim is in this kind of painting,

and in a lot of his disaster paintings,

which is to give a view from outside,

but also to try and convey an experience from inside.

The steamboat itself is a relatively new invention.

It's invented at the beginning of the 19th century.

But Turner obliterates technology in progress,

confronted by the forces of nature.

And he grabs everything and anything,

from his brushes, using both ends, to his palette knives,

and uses his fingers, too, to drag the paint across in a sculptural way.

And what we're left with, I think,

is a feeling that a career has come full circle.

We're back where we started with that idea of disaster,

shipwreck, and the sublime.

With this painting, he continued the theme he'd used 30 years before

with Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps,

the domination of nature over man.

But the relationship between man and nature is much less clear-cut.

In this picture, called Rain, Steam, Speed,

the Great Western Railway,

completed by Turner sometime around 1843, 1844.

And what we're seeing is the Great Western Railway,

just completed, actually in 1839,

built by the great engineer Brunel,

linking London to Bristol and Exeter.

But what Turner does is paints this locomotive

hurtling its way straight out of the painting.

He also experiences the sensation of travelling at speed,

at first hand, because he rides the locomotive,

and actually sticks his head out the window for ten minutes

in order to get that sensation of a world passing.

And that is brilliantly and effectively conveyed in this painting,

where air and light fuse together.

The train, coming straight out, is also pursuing a hare.

You can see, in beautiful but tiny detail,

a hare that, when you look at it again, you realise is far too big.

And there's something ambivalent about this.

What's Turner saying?

Well, to some, he's saying that man-made inventions

that can travel about 50 miles an hour

still can't catch the natural world,

the fastest creature in the British Isles, the hare.

And yet, the implication is

that the train will eventually catch it up and savage it.

And so, the world is under threat.

But Turner, unlike someone like Wordsworth,

who was horrified by the onset of the machine age,

fuses the whole idea of inevitability, progress, he embraces it.

It's alarming, but at the same time, he says,

it's the way the world is, and we should celebrate it too.

Right up to his death,

Turner continued to push his painting to an extreme

in images like this one,

Norham Castle Sunrise,

where he uses oils like watercolour

and gives a fluid, delicate luminosity

that hovers on the edge of a pure, blinding vision

that's almost abstraction.

In 1850, he exhibited four of these late paintings

at the Academy in the year before he died.

No mean feat for a man of 75.

Turner died on the 19th of December, 1851,

at his home in Chelsea.

The doctor noted that just before he passed away,

the room was darkened by the dull day.

Moments later, as his spirit left him,

quote,

the sun burst forth and shone directly on him

with that brilliancy which he loved to gaze on

and transfer to his paintings.

Turner was buried at St Paul's Cathedral.

Five years after his death,

the nation received his vast collection of works,

over 19,000 drawings and hundreds of watercolours

and oil paintings,

much of which is now on show at Tate Britain,

and which has secured his place as,

unarguably, the greatest British landscape painter.

But he also was a control freak and an artist who built his own myth.

And so, he gave this painting to the National Gallery.

He considered it to be his greatest work,

Dido building Carthage,

but on condition that it was shown next to this painting

by Claude Lorraine, his great artistic hero.

Now, Turner's doing two things.

One, he's establishing himself in the pantheon of great Western art,

but two, and like any other artist here,

he's stipulating the conditions under which his art must be seen.

And in some ways, that's very modern,

the idea about being concerned with your own image.

But then, as both artist and visionary, academician and rebel,

Turner was of his time and way ahead of it too.