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 are 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, don'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 visionary trip
that would culminate in the greatest British painting
of the nineteenth century, The Slave Ship.
Why, that is very fine.
Forty years before the heroic fiasco of The Slave Ship,
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 a 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 granted 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,
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 time to enjoy being JMW Turner, RA.
He's rolling in money and commissions,
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 through 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 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 things 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's a political militant,
the scourge of the old Tory establishment.
But the cause that's most dear to this 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 with 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 did this picture pull 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 arch enemy, 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 no 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, by the death of Turner's younger sister.
In 1800, she was incarcerated in Bedlam,
disappearing from his life and dying four 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 figures 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 no 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 want 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 being 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 of 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 thousands 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 caught off the coast of Jamaica,
but off the canvas of Hieronymus Bosch, 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 your 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 his 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 Dead 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 this 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 debacle of The Slave Ship,
a young Scottish admirer, William Leighton Leitch,
visited Turner's house in Queen Anne Street.
He'd heard 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 he 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 truths 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
transports us somewhere where the slick conformist would never dare to go.
Into the eye of history's storm.
Into the ocean of light.