Tell them all.
May 1840.
The annual exhibition
of the Royal Academy in London
has been a great success.
On display,
all the reviewers agree
is one indisputable masterpiece.
Painted by Edwin Landseer,
it’s called Laying Down the Law.
And it features,
as the learned judge,
a poodle.
It is, the critics chorus, perfect.
Perfect in execution,
taste and refinement.
But there’s another painting
hanging in the 1840 show about which
the critics also absolutely unanimous
in dismay and scorn.
JMW Turner’s Slave Ship.
How is it that we can see a masterpiece,
while the critics compared it to
a kitchen accident
or the contents of a spittoon?
Had Turner gone over the top
with this voyage into a sweaty nightmare,
this fantastical image of slaves
cruelly murdered at sea?
Why had a work Turner had hoped
would make people weep,
instead move them to describe it
as a detestable absurdity?
What was it about
this particular painting,
the consummation of Turner’s career
that brought down on his head,
such a storm of abuse?
We all think we know Turner,
didn’t we?
He seems as comfortably British
as a cup of tea.
He is, after all,
the National Gallery’s all-time favourite.
But there was another Turner.
The Turner you don’t know.
The painter of chaos,
conflagration and apocalypse,
wild and ambitious paintings,
that one critic called
“a picture of nothing,
and very like”.
Well this is my Turner,
extreme Turner.
The Cockney poet
just short of madness.
The Turner we ought to know,
the Turner we really ought to revere.
This Turner was on a delirious
and visionary trip that would culminate
in the greatest British painting
of the 19-century,
The Slave Ship.
40 years before
the heroic fiasco of The Slave Ship,
the young Turner could do no wrong.
In his twenties,
the barber’s son had already been tipped
as the next great thing in British painting.
With the dab of his brush,
he could wave fairy dust
over the genteel British countryside.
And it would turn into a place
of sublime enchantment.
And the quality ate it up.
Britain was fighting for its life
against the French,
and the romance of Albion
had never bitten deeper
into the national imagination.
Turner, meanwhile,
had been a great honour.
Fellowship of the Royal Academy at just 26.
Now, he had to present them
with a picture to mark his entry.
He gave them this.
Which was to say a shock.
Dolbadern Castle in Snowdonia
was where a medieval Welsh prince,
Owen Gough, had met his end.
In reality,
it was just a modest pile of stones on a hillside,
but Turner pumps up the melodrama,
backlights the desolate crag,
so that the castle becomes a personification
of the defiant prince himself.
The tragic symbol of imprisoned liberty.
Just in case people didn’t get it,
he added a little poem.
How awful is the silence of the waste.
Where nature lifts her mountains to the sky.
Majestic solitude.
Behold the tower where hapless Owen
long imprisoned pined
and wrung his hands for liberty in vain.
Okay, so it’s not exactly Keats,
but it is Turner reaching for the epic.
It’s all about atmospherics, not finicky,
topographical description.
‘Cause that’s what Britain was for Turner,
a biological sentiment,
an instinct in the blood,
and an irresistibly operatic arrangement
of light, air and water.
Elemental, heroic, legendary.
The painting smoothed the way
for the young man into the ranks
of the Academy.
But it should have put everyone on notice
that this was a painter
who’d never settle
for the charming and the pretty.
Turner could have made
a perfectly decent living
raking it in
from the pleasure and leisure industry.
But in his fertile imagination,
something grand and bloody
was already stirring.
But he still had a fortune to make.
He wasn’t ready yet to be the maker
of dark epics.
It was the time to enjoy being
JMW Turner, RA.
He’s rolling in money and commission,
and he buys a West End house
for his pictures,
himself and his old dad,
whom he shamelessly turns into his
all-purpose servant.
Old Dad would stretch and prime canvasses.
Old Dad would patrol the gallery.
Old Dad would tend
the vegetable garden out by the river
and revel in his son’s fame
and fortune.
Good old Dad.
But then, conventional family ties
don’t seem to mean much to Turner.
There’s no dutiful Mrs T at home.
Marriage and art don’t go together,
he said.
So instead,
he takes as a lover the widow of a friend,
Sarah Danby,
and installs her round the corner.
He even has two children by her.
More illicitly still,
Sarah is the muse of his erotic imagination.
His drawings suggest he takes
as much pleasure in sex
as a full moon over Buttermere.
It wasn’t until Turner’s will was published
that anyone knew
about Sarah Danby and the children.
And the erotica
remained strictly under wraps
in his lifetime.
Turner chose to live part of his life
amidst the shadows of secret fantasies.
But when he emerged from this world
and strolled beside the Thames,
he indulged in another fantasy.
That he lived in a country
from which poverty, hunger and misery
had been banished.
Turner’s Thames was the place where
the romance of England came to him
with lyrical intensity.
A place of almost narcotic serenity.
This is the pleasure seeking
public pleasing Turner.
And perhaps, he could have settled for this
mellow dream world,
gently stroking
the self-satisfaction of Regency England.
But even as he drifted trough
his Home Counties Eden,
Turner must have been aware
that alongside this idyll,
there was another England,
an England in distress.
And something in Turner
wanted to paint that England too.
For this was the early 1800s,
the rockiest years in all
modern British history,
the time when the distance between
the fantasy Britain
and the reality was at its widest.
The kingdom was supposed to be
a model of political and social stability.
But there was a massive unemployment,
hunger, anger,
rick burning in the countryside,
machine smashing in the towns.
The bloody war with Napoleon’s France
grinding on and on.
These are hard times, radical times.
So Turner produces
a gritty image of rough Britannia.
What’s your most delicious fantasy
of old England?
Summertime? A picnic?
Well, here’s a hard-bitten winter dawn,
and it’s no picnic.
A shot hare
slung around the shoulders of a girl.
Rutted tracks.
Two men digging a ditch,
or is it a grave?
You can feel the tough work of it
in that hard, frozen soil.
Everything impassive, unsentimental, dour.
How thing really are.
When did Constable ever do winter
in the North?
Why would Turner ever do
something so flinty?
Well, in Yorkshire,
he has become best mates
with someone who will change the way
he sees the world.
Walter Fawkes’s view of Britain
isn’t exactly rose-tinted,
and he’s not your usual country gent.
He is a political militant,
the scourge of the old Tory establishment.
But the cause that’s most dear to
his radical toff
is the great moral crusade of the day,
the abolition of the slave trade.
Fawkes’s fury seeped
into Turner’s imagination.
One day in 1810,
Turner took Fawkes’s son
for a walk on the Yorkshire Moors
as a storm brewed.
The two of them sketch away.
Turner puts his pencil down.
“There, Hawkey,” he says,
“in two years you’ll see this,
and it’ll be called
“Hannibal Crossing the Alps.”
So a squall over the Yorkshire Moors
turns into a no-holds-barred
Alpine cataclysm.
A simultaneous blizzard
and a shaft of sickly sun.
Hannibal’s army is the victim,
as it clambers its painful way
over the Alpine passes.
Stragglers picked off
by scary mountain men,
while a sucking vortex
hovers over the scene like some gigantic,
malevolent bird of prey.
Turner does something tremendous
in the storm over the Yorkshire Moors.
It’s not just scenic weather;
it’s a cosmic reckoning.
Hannibal is a hit.
People crowded round it
so densely,
the gents couldn’t elbow
their way in to see it.
But why this picture pulls in the crowds?
Not because it was a scene
from ancient history,
but because everybody knew
it was also a modern painting.
A contemporary story.
The comeuppance handed out to
another arrogant invader
who crossed the Alps in search of glory.
The archenemy, Napoleon.
In a crushing putdown,
Turner shrinks the mighty commander
to a puny,
almost comical figure
in the remote background,
atop an elephant
that looks more like a dung beetle.
You have to say this about Turner, though.
He’s an equal opportunity pessimist.
As much as he wants to see
the end of Napoleon,
he’s got a damn funny way
of celebrating Waterloo.
In 1817,
does he paint victorious Wellington
and his gallant scarlet squares
of embattled grenadiers?
No, he gives us a carpet of corpses
in the blackness.
Wives and sweethearts with their babies,
pathetically searching the carnage
for their loved ones.
An apparition of pure hell.
Rather than glorify the Iron Duke,
it seems to exemplify
one of his pithiest verdicts.
The next worst thing to a battle lost
is a battle won.
No wonder it wasn’t until the 1980s
that this painting was properly displayed.
Turner’s refusal to beat
the patriotic drum
or wag the flag cost him patrons.
But with the Field of Waterloo,
he’s reached for something profound.
A British art that will act out
the suffering of victims.
But, then, Turner knows all about
the lot of the common people.
# No power on Earth can e’er divide #
# The knot that sacred love hath ty’d #
# No power on Earth can e’er divide #
# The knot that sacred love hath ty’d #
He’s not gentleman artist.
He was born and grew up
in the filthy back alleys of Covent Garden,
where every day, he rubbed shoulders
with the desperate and the destitute.
#... against our mind #
# The true love’s knot they faster bind #
This didn’t make his Waterloo
or any of his historical epics
manifestoes for revolution.
They’re bigger, more disturbing than that.
They have washing through them
the tragic truth about
the powerlessness
of ordinary people when faced with
atrocity and disaster.
People who existed right on the edge.
And there was someone in his own life
who’d gone right over it.
His mother.
Mary Turner
was a shrieking fury
in the painter’s house.
Driven mad, perhaps,
the death of Turner’s younger sister.
In 1800,
she was incarcerated in Bedlam,
disappearing from his life
and dying 4 years later, in total neglect.
But if Turner abandoned her,
could there have been,
I wonder, a haunting?
Was Mary’s howling rage
translated into the dark thunder
and burning gold of Turner’s skies?
This much I can say.
That an acute,
tragic sense of the frailty of human existence
framed Turner’s life
and powers the greatest of his works.
So the figure who populate
his history paintings
are often weirdly invertebrate.
So many rag dolls tossed around
by the immense forces of fate.
Painting these discarded marionettes
was particularly wilful for someone
who’d studied academic figure drawing.
But then, despite the fact
he’s been a fellow at the Academy
for nearly 20 years,
Turner was proving to be the odd man out
in the play-safe world of British art.
It’s not just what he paints
that gets him into trouble
with high-class critics,
it’s the way he paints it.
One critic despairs that Turner delights
in abstractions that go back to
the first chaos of the world.
Well, my dears,
what would you expect from the
grubby little parvenu
with his downmarket accent
and his upmarket house?
There’s something obstinately coarse
that clings to him,
a pungent social aroma.
When Turner visits France,
the painter Delacroix is taken aback
that he looks rather like
a farmer with unwashed hands.
Oh, there’s dirt under Turner’s nails, all right,
but it’s likely to be gamboge yellow
or Prussian blue,
not farm muck.
And the worst thing
is that he seems to wear
his unwashed hands
like a badge of professional pride.
When a young gentleman
aspirant artist comes to see him,
Turner grabs his lily-white hands
and growls…
You’re not artist.
Turner himself
uses his fingers to make his art;
keeps a nail deliberately untrimmed
so he could wield it like a claw
to cut into the paint surface.
He’s no dainty brush-flicker.
He wipes and scrapes,
attacks the surface with a pumice stone,
spits into the paint
and gives it a good smoosh.
It’s this joyous urchin-like wallowing
in the muck and slather of paint
that Turner’s critics found so appalling.
And one of them complained
about his perpetual need
to be extraordinary.
Well, yes, how very un-British.
But Turner didn’t wanted to be boxed in
by what Britain was becoming.
An empire of solid,
prosaic commercial facts.
He needed something more,
a place where the poetic imagination
could drift and float.
There was one place where
not to be sound or solid was of the essence.
Venice.
For 20 years, off and on,
Turner made the floating city
his soul mate.
Turner was spellbound
and conjured from a wisp here,
a daub there,
the gauzy radiance of the place.
Turner’s critics accused him
of the cardinal sin of indistinctness.
But here in the floating city
where everything was liquid and slippery,
he could embrace that indistinctness,
make it his own particular glory.
Turner could have been
tranquillised by Venice,
seduced into becoming
an accomplished supplier
of sensuous bliss.
But the stagnant beauty of the city
made him think of something else.
He looked at Venice and he saw death.
For most of his life,
Turner had been the picture
of rude health.
Now he’s sick, losing weight, wheezing.
He feels the grip
of the ancient story of life and death
in his very own bones.
Mortality eats away at him.
His indispensable,
multi-tasking old dad had died.
Not just his personal jack-of-all-trades,
but his best friend.
Other cherished intimates, Walter Fawkes,
the old radical, had gone, too.
To keep the aches and pains at bay,
he uses a tincture of thorn apple to cope,
a narcotic,
which probably sends his always
hyperactive visual imagination
into planetary orbit.
And from his bad dreams
gallops a biblical horror.
And I looked and beheld a pale horse,
and his name that sat on him was Death,
and Hell followed with him.
But Turner paints his way
out of the nightmare.
Look closely, the skeleton is limp.
Death is dead.
Turner lives to paint on.
He won’t limply surrender
like some consumptive Romantic.
Instead he gathers his energies,
puts his obsession to work,
makes the cycle of life and death,
suffering and salvation,
the theme of his greatest period of painting.
He’s deep into his middle age.
When he stares at the waves
pounding the coast of Kent,
he feels that rhythm
of destruction and creation.
Now, Margate might not seem to you
much of a place to brood
on historical destiny,
but for Turner,
it was definitely more than just
seaside ozone
and a stroll along the beach.
The sea becomes something more than
the carrier of power and wealth.
It’s the stage on which
the drama of British history gets played out.
Sometimes that drama
is fierce and turbulent,
and sometimes it’s a comforting story
for revolutionary times.
So in the painting he calls his “old darling”,
he gives us romantic wistfulness
for the veteran battleship of Trafalgar,
The Fighting Temeraire.
The vessel is restored fictitiously,
to one last heroic farewell voyage
before being broken up.
In Turner’s picture,
its masts are still standing,
its sails furled.
But the little steam-power tug that pulls it
isn’t some sort of modern villain.
It’s simply a fact of life
in the new Britain,
a nation in upheaval
as the Industrial Revolution
gathers momentum.
And Turner has perfect pitch
for a British public torn
between affection for the past
and anticipation for the future.
It’s so emotionally versatile,
this picture,
that it lets you indulge
whatever mood takes you.
Feel like an elegy?
Well, fine, then this can be
the sunset of Nelson’s England.
Just made a lot of money from an industrial patent,
and feeling good?
Fine again,
this is the sunrise of your new industrial empire.
But Turner’s restless imagination
won’t settle for poignant gentleness.
He knows the truth is more tumultuous
and that the sea has terrible tales to tell.
Ships in peril fill his mind,
and those ships become
an emblem of the country.
The oceanic deep becomes the site
on which imperial destiny unfolds,
where British history will be wrecked,
rescued or salvaged.
The Amphitrite was a convict ship
carrying women and children to Australia.
But it didn’t get far.
In the channel, off Boulogne,
the ship ran aground
and began to break up.
The French offered to land
the passengers and the crew.
But the captain, a brutal disciplinarian,
rejected the offer on the grounds
he had no authority to land them
anywhere except their antipodean prison.
The crew clung to masts and spars,
and most survived the wreck.
But the women and children,
all 125 of them,
were swept away and drowned.
Like his Waterloo,
it’s a painting of victims,
so much human flotsam and jetsam.
But this is the bare skeleton of a masterwork.
Turner never finished or showed it.
But the idea behind it, cruelty at sea,
blood, martyrdom,
retribution and salvation,
had certainly not gone away.
It simmered
and then exploded in a sky
the colour of blood.
In the late 1830s,
one issue
galvanised British moral outrage
more than any other:
slavery.
Britain had outlawed slavery
throughout the Empire.
But in the Hispanic empires
and the United States,
it not only survived, but thrived.
In 1840, in London,
an International Convention
of the Great and Good
was planned to express
righteous indignation at this fact.
Turner, initiated into the cause
so many years ago by his patron,
Walter Fawkes,
wanted to have his say in paint.
And how does he do it?
By being a thorn in the side
of self-congratulation.
Turner reaches back 60 years to resurrect
one of the most shameful episodes
in the history of the British Empire.
In 1781, the British slaver, the Zong,
was off the coast of Jamaica
after a routinely profitable journey
from Africa.
But deep below decks, there was trouble.
Slaves were dying at more
than the usual rate.
And the ship’s master, Luke Collingwood,
suddenly had a business disaster
on his hands.
His human cargo was insured,
but the underwriters would only pay up
if the casualties could be accounted for
as losses at sea,
not dead on arrival.
So Captain Collingwood went below decks
and began the merciless business of
selecting which slaves he would swiftly turn
into “losses at sea”.
132 Africans,
men, women and children,
their hands and feet fettered,
were thrown overboard
into the shark-infested waters
of the Caribbean.
The moral horror of the case of the Zong
was the moment
when thousand of Britons
abandoned their indifference
and became campaigners
against the slave trade.
132 Africans perished horribly,
but a mass movement was born
from their martyrdom.
Turner’s approach to this
appalling tragedy
was not that of
a literal historical illustrator.
What the great enchanter
of the canvas wanted was,
Prospero-like,
to summon an apocalypse, a typhoon.
The Slave Ship pitches us
into the midst of a feverish dream
of catastrophe and terror,
sin and retribution.
The silhouetted ship,
almost engulfed in the erupting spray,
is both a real vessel
and something cursed and haunted,
like the ship of the Ancient Mariner.
Waves seethe with monsters,
a kind of obscene piranha-like
nibbling and gobbling.
And the oncoming fishy monster
is not to be catch off
the coast of Jamaica,
but off the canvas
of Hieronymus Bosh,
Hell, in high water.
Of course, it has its imperfections,
all that flailing flurry of action
in the foreground,
the mysteriously floating iron fetters,
the flung limb that may or may not
be detached from its torso.
All the frantic fishy action could seem
too fussily staged.
In the end,
there’s only one test that matters.
You come into the room,
you fix it in your sights,
does it or does it not
attack you in the guts?
It does.
Does your heart jump? Do your eyes widen?
Does your pulse race?
Do you feet get a bad attack
of lead boots,
you’re so struck down by it? They do.
For Turner has drowned you in this moment,
pulled you into this terrifying
chasm in the ocean,
drenched you in his bloody light.
Exactly the hue
you sense on your blood-filled optic nerves
when you close your eyes
in blinding sunlight.
Though almost all of these critics
believed that The Slavers
represented an all-time low
in Turner’s reckless disregard
for the rules of art
it was in fact his greatest triumph
in the sculptural carving of space.
For none of the stormy atmospherics,
the great pinwheel fury of reds and golds,
would have the impact they did,
were it not for that deep trough
Turner has cut in the ocean,
which at the centre of the painting
makes the blackly heaving swells stand still
as though the wrathful hand of Jehovah
has suddenly passed
over the boiling waters.
For this is a day of martyrdom,
retribution and judgement.
But also a scene,
Turner must have optimistically thought,
of vindication.
It would be a sin redeemed.
Slavery would be defeated.
There is, after all,
a patch of clearing blue
at the top right corner of the painting.
The critics went to town.
Turner became the butt of jokes,
a crackpot, old loon, lost in the tempest
with his ridiculous painting.
And its even more ridiculous full title,
Slavers,
Slave Ship Throwing Over the Death and Dying,
Typhoon Coming on.
Punch magazine joined in
the chorus of catcalls,
lampooning Turner
by inventing a painting with the title,
“A typhoon bursting a samoon
over a whirlpool maelstrom”,
“Norway, a ship on fire,
and eclipse with the effect
of a lunar rainbow”.
But Punch
and all the other high-hat critics
missed the one overwhelming point
which makes the greatest British picture
of the 19th century,
the perfect match between message and form.
The payoff of the slaves’ martyrdom
would in the end be freedom.
So Turner has given himself
glorious freedom
with his brush and with his colour,
and with his imagery,
to convey the power of the sacred moment.
Two years after the debate
of The Slave Ship,
a young Scottish admirer,
William Leitch,
visited Turner’s house in Queen Anne Street.
He’d herd that the Turner gallery
was in disrepair,
but nothing could possibly have prepared
Leitch for the squalor.
I walked backwards and forwards
in the gallery,
feeling cold and uncomfortable.
There was no sound to be heard
but the rain splashing
through the broken windows
upon the floor.
Leitch stood in the evil-smelling gloom.
And as peered at Turner’s most recent work,
among which was hanging, somewhere,
the scarlet explosion that was the unsold,
unwanted, unloved Slave Ship,
he felt more and more depressed.
But this was the moment
when the country’s favourite painter,
once revered as the patriarch of British art,
was written off as a senile lunatic.
Yet the effect of the critical onslaught
is to make him more, not less, brave.
He’s off on his own now,
the solitary mariner
on a completely unchartered ocean
of pure painting.
Alongside all these scenes
of oceanic turmoil,
Turner was still capable of painting images
of exquisite liquid calm.
But you have the feeling
he could do those in his sleep.
It’s when his whirlpool of paint resolves
itself into something weightier and mightier
than the entertainment of the senses,
when he reaches towards
the truth of history and eternity
that I think Turner is at his greatest.
That’s when he changes
not just British art,
but all of art, most completely.
And you know,
this is why Turner still matters to us
and always will.
That old Cockney geezer in his battered hat
and filthy coat transport us somewhere
the slick conformist would never dare to go.
Into the eye of history’s storm.
Into the ocean of light.