Simon Schama's Power of Art - Turner The Slave Ship - BBC Documentary

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.