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Tell them all.
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May, 1840.
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The annual exhibition
of the Royal Academy in London
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has been a great success.
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On display, all the reviewers agree,
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is one indisputable masterpiece.
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Painted by Edwin Landseer,
it's called Laying Down the Law.
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And it features, as the learned judge, a poodle.
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It is, the critics chorus, perfect.
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Perfect in execution, taste and refinement.
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But there's another painting
hanging in the 1840 show
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about which the critics
are also absolutely unanimous
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in dismay and scorn.
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JMW Turner's Slave Ship.
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How is it that we can see a masterpiece,
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while the critics compared it to a kitchen accident
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or the contents of a spittoon?
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Had Turner gone over the top
with this voyage into a sweaty nightmare,
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this fantastical image
of slaves cruelly murdered at sea?
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Why had a work Turner had hoped
would make people weep,
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instead move them to describe it
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as a detestable absurdity?
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What was it about this particular painting,
the consummation of Turner's career,
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that brought down on his head
such a storm of abuse?
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We all think we know Turner, don't we?
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He seems as comfortably British as a cup of tea.
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He is, after all, the National Gallery's
all-time favourite.
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But there was another Turner,
the Turner you don't know.
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The painter of chaos,
conflagration and apocalypse,
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wild and ambitious paintings,
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that one critic called
''a picture of nothing, and very like.''
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Well, this is my Turner, extreme Turner.
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The Cockney poet just short of madness.
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The Turner we ought to know,
the Turner we really ought to revere.
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This Turner was on a delirious visionary trip
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that would culminate
in the greatest British painting
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of the nineteenth century, The Slave Ship.
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Why, that is very fine.
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Forty years before the heroic fiasco
of The Slave Ship,
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young Turner could do no wrong.
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In his twenties,
the barber's son had already been tipped
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as the next great thing in British painting.
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With a dab of his brush, he could wave fairy dust
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over the genteel British countryside.
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And it would turn into
a place of sublime enchantment.
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And the quality ate it up.
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Britain was fighting for its life against the French,
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and the romance of Albion
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had never bitten deeper
into the national imagination.
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Turner, meanwhile,
had been granted a great honour.
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Fellowship of the Royal Academy at just 26.
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Now, he had to present them
with a picture to mark his entry.
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He gave them this.
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Which was to say, a shock.
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Dolbadern Castle in Snowdonia
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was where a medieval Welsh prince,
Owen Gough, had met his end.
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In reality, it was just a modest pile of stones
on a hillside,
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but Turner pumps up the melodrama,
backlights the desolate crag,
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so that the castle becomes a personification
of the defiant prince himself.
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The tragic symbol of imprisoned liberty.
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Just in case people didn't get it,
he added a little poem.
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How awful is the silence of the waste
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Where nature lifts her mountains to the sky
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Majestic solitude
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Behold the tower
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Where hapless Owen long imprisoned pined
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And wrung his hands for liberty in vain
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Okay, so it's not exactly Keats,
but it is Turner reaching for the epic.
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It's all about atmospherics,
not finicky, topographical description.
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'Cause that's what Britain was for Turner,
a biological sentiment,
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an instinct in the blood,
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an irresistibly operatic arrangement
of light, air and water.
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Elemental, heroic, legendary.
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The painting smoothed the way
for the young man into the ranks of the Academy.
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But it should have put everyone on notice
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that this was a painter who'd never settle
for the charming and the pretty.
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Turner could have made a perfectly decent living,
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raking it in from the pleasure and leisure industry.
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But in his fertile imagination,
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something grand and bloody was already stirring.
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But he still had a fortune to make.
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He wasn't ready yet to be the maker of dark epics.
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It was time to enjoy being JMW Turner, RA.
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He's rolling in money and commissions,
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and he buys a West End house
for his pictures, himself and his old dad,
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whom he shamelessly turns into
his all-purpose servant.
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Old Dad would stretch and prime canvasses.
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Old Dad would patrol the gallery.
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Old Dad would tend the vegetable garden
out by the river
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and revel in his son's fame and fortune.
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Good old Dad.
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But then, conventional family ties
don't seem to mean much to Turner.
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There's no dutiful Mrs T at home.
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Marriage and art don't go together, he said.
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So instead, he takes as a lover
the widow of a friend, Sarah Danby,
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and installs her round the corner.
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He even has two children by her.
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More illicitly still, Sarah is the muse
of his erotic imagination.
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His drawings suggest he takes as much pleasure
in sex as a full moon over Buttermere.
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It wasn't until Turner's will was published
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that anyone knew about
Sarah Danby and the children.
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And the erotica remained strictly under wraps
in his lifetime.
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Turner chose to live part of his life
amidst the shadows of secret fantasies.
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But when he emerged from this world
and strolled beside the Thames,
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he indulged in another fantasy.
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That he lived in a country from which poverty,
hunger and misery had been banished.
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Turner's Thames was the place
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where the romance of England
came to him with lyrical intensity.
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A place of almost narcotic serenity.
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This is the pleasure-seeking,
public-pleasing Turner.
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And perhaps he could have settled
for this mellow dream world,
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gently stroking the self-satisfaction
of Regency England.
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But even as he drifted
through his Home Counties Eden,
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Turner must have been aware that alongside
this idyll, there was another England,
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an England in distress.
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And something in Turner
wanted to paint that England too.
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For this was the early 1800s,
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the rockiest years in all modern British history,
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the time when the distance between
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the fantasy Britain
and the reality was at its widest.
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The kingdom was supposed to be
a model of political and social stability.
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But there was massive unemployment,
hunger, anger, rick-burning in the countryside,
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machine-smashing in the towns.
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The bloody war with Napoleon's France
grinding on and on.
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These are hard times, radical times.
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So Turner produces a gritty image
of rough Britannia.
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What's your most delicious fantasy
of old England?
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Summertime? A picnic?
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Well, here's a hard-bitten winter dawn,
and it's no picnic.
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A shot hare slung around the shoulders of a girl.
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Rutted tracks.
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Two men digging a ditch, or is it a grave?
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You can feel the tough work of it
in that hard, frozen soil.
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Everything impassive, unsentimental, dour.
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How things really are.
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When did Constable ever do winter in the North?
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Why would Turner ever do something so flinty?
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Well, in Yorkshire,
he has become best mates with someone
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who will change the way he sees the world.
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Walter Fawkes's view of Britain
isn't exactly rose-tinted,
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and he's not your usual country gent.
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He's a political militant,
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the scourge of the old Tory establishment.
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But the cause that's most dear to this radical toff
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is the great moral crusade of the day,
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the abolition of the slave trade.
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Fawkes's fury seeped into Turner's imagination.
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One day in 1810,
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Turner took Fawkes's son for a walk
on the Yorkshire Moors
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as a storm brewed.
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The two of them sketch away.
Turner puts his pencil down.
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''There, Hawkey,'' he says, ''in two years
you'll see this, and it'll be called
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''Hannibal Crossing the Alps. ''
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So a squall over the Yorkshire Moors
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turns into a no-holds-barred Alpine cataclysm.
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A simultaneous blizzard and a shaft of sickly sun.
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Hannibal's army is the victim,
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as it clambers its painful way
over the Alpine passes.
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Stragglers picked off by scary mountain men,
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while a sucking vortex hovers over the scene
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like some gigantic, malevolent bird of prey.
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Turner does something tremendous
with the storm over the Yorkshire Moors.
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It's not just scenic weather,
it's a cosmic reckoning.
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Hannibal is a hit.
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People crowded round it so densely,
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the gents couldn't elbow their way in to see it.
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But why did this picture pull in the crowds?
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Not because it was a scene from ancient history,
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but because everybody knew
it was also a modern painting.
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A contemporary story.
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The comeuppance handed out
to another arrogant invader
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who crossed the Alps in search of glory.
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The arch enemy, Napoleon.
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In a crushing putdown,
Turner shrinks the mighty commander
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to a puny, almost comical figure
in the remote background,
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atop an elephant
that looks more like a dung beetle.
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You have to say this about Turner, though.
He's an equal-opportunity pessimist.
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As much as he wants to see the end of Napoleon,
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he's got a damn funny way
of celebrating Waterloo.
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In 1817, does he paint victorious Wellington
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and his gallant scarlet squares
of embattled grenadiers?
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No, he gives us a carpet of corpses
in the blackness.
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Wives and sweethearts with their babies,
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pathetically searching the carnage
for their loved ones.
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An apparition of pure hell.
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Rather than glorify the Iron Duke,
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it seems to exemplify one of his pithiest verdicts.
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The next worst thing
to a battle lost is a battle won.
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No wonder it wasn't until the 1980s
that this painting was properly displayed.
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Turner's refusal to beat the patriotic drum
or wag the flag cost him patrons.
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But with The Field of Waterloo,
he's reached for something profound.
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A British art that will act out
the suffering of victims.
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But, then, Turner knows all about
the lot of the common people.
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# No power on Earth can e'er divide
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# The knot that sacred love hath ty'd
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# No power on Earth can e'er divide
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# The knot that sacred love hath ty'd #
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He's no gentleman artist.
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He was born and grew up
in the filthy back alleys of Covent Garden,
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where every day, he rubbed shoulders
with the desperate and the destitute.
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# ...against our mind
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# The true love's knot they faster bind #
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This didn't make his Waterloo
or any of his historical epics
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manifestoes for revolution.
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They're bigger, more disturbing than that.
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They have washing through them
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the tragic truth about the powerlessness
of ordinary people
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when faced with atrocity and disaster.
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People who existed right on the edge.
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And there was someone in his own life
who'd gone right over it.
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His mother.
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Mary Turner was a shrieking fury
in the painter's house.
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Driven mad, perhaps,
by the death of Turner's younger sister.
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In 1800, she was incarcerated in Bedlam,
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disappearing from his life
and dying four years later in total neglect.
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But if Turner abandoned her,
could there have been, I wonder, a haunting?
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Was Mary's howling rage
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translated into the dark thunder
and burning gold of Turner's skies?
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This much I can say.
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That an acute, tragic sense
of the frailty of human existence
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framed Turner's life
and powers the greatest of his works.
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So the figures who populate his history paintings
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are often weirdly invertebrate.
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So many rag dolls
tossed around by the immense forces of fate.
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Painting these discarded marionettes
was particularly wilful
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for someone who'd studied
academic figure drawing.
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But then, despite the fact he's been a fellow
at the Academy for nearly 20 years,
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Turner was proving to be the odd man out
in the play-safe world of British art.
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It's not just what he paints
that gets him into trouble with high-class critics,
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it's the way he paints it.
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One critic despairs that Turner
delights in abstractions
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that go back to the first chaos of the world.
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Well, my dears, what would you expect
from the grubby little parvenu
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with his downmarket accent
and his upmarket house?
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There's something obstinately coarse
that clings to him,
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a pungent social aroma.
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When Turner visits France, the painter Delacroix
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is taken aback that he looks
rather like a farmer with unwashed hands.
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Oh, there's dirt under Turner's nails, all right,
240
00:26:53,772 --> 00:26:59,085
but it's likely to be gamboge yellow
or Prussian blue, not farm muck.
241
00:26:59,172 --> 00:27:02,721
And the worst thing
is that he seems to wear his unwashed hands
242
00:27:02,812 --> 00:27:05,565
like a badge of professional pride.
243
00:27:07,252 --> 00:27:11,040
When a young gentleman aspirant artist
comes to see him,
244
00:27:11,132 --> 00:27:14,807
Turner grabs his lily-white hands and growls...
245
00:27:14,892 --> 00:27:16,610
You're no artist.
246
00:27:22,452 --> 00:27:27,367
Turner himself uses his fingers to make his art,
247
00:27:27,452 --> 00:27:32,082
keeps a nail deliberately untrimmed
so he could wield it like a claw
248
00:27:32,172 --> 00:27:34,606
to cut into the paint surface.
249
00:27:34,692 --> 00:27:39,561
He's no dainty brush-flicker.
He wipes and scrapes,
250
00:27:39,652 --> 00:27:42,371
attacks the surface with a pumice stone,
251
00:27:42,452 --> 00:27:45,842
spits into the paint and gives it a good smoosh.
252
00:27:46,972 --> 00:27:52,808
It's this joyous urchin-like wallowing
in the muck and slather of paint
253
00:27:52,892 --> 00:27:56,362
that Turner's critics found so appalling.
254
00:27:56,452 --> 00:28:01,731
And one of them complained
about his perpetual need to be extraordinary.
255
00:28:01,812 --> 00:28:04,246
Well, yes, how very un-British.
256
00:28:38,132 --> 00:28:42,603
But Turner didn't want to be boxed in
by what Britain was becoming.
257
00:28:43,612 --> 00:28:48,163
An empire of solid, prosaic commercial facts.
258
00:28:48,252 --> 00:28:52,530
He needed something more,
a place where the poetic imagination
259
00:28:52,612 --> 00:28:54,762
could drift and float.
260
00:29:00,092 --> 00:29:04,643
There was one place
where not being sound or solid
261
00:29:04,732 --> 00:29:07,485
was of the essence. Venice.
262
00:29:07,572 --> 00:29:13,010
For 20 years, off and on,
Turner made the floating city his soul mate.
263
00:29:34,612 --> 00:29:37,729
Turner was spellbound and conjured
264
00:29:37,812 --> 00:29:40,690
from a wisp here, a daub there,
265
00:29:40,772 --> 00:29:43,844
the gauzy radiance of the place.
266
00:29:49,772 --> 00:29:54,926
Turner's critics accused him
of the cardinal sin of indistinctness.
267
00:29:55,372 --> 00:29:59,684
But here in the floating city
where everything was liquid and slippery,
268
00:29:59,772 --> 00:30:04,800
he could embrace that indistinctness,
make it his own particular glory.
269
00:31:11,612 --> 00:31:14,809
Turner could have been tranquillised by Venice,
270
00:31:15,932 --> 00:31:21,484
seduced into becoming
an accomplished supplier of sensuous bliss.
271
00:31:24,612 --> 00:31:28,890
But the stagnant beauty of the city
made him think of something else.
272
00:31:31,892 --> 00:31:35,362
He looked at Venice and he saw death.
273
00:31:54,332 --> 00:31:58,291
For most of his life,
Turner had been the picture of rude health.
274
00:31:58,412 --> 00:32:02,291
Now he's sick, losing weight, wheezing.
275
00:32:06,932 --> 00:32:13,280
He feels the grip of the ancient story
of life and death in his very own bones.
276
00:32:36,572 --> 00:32:38,927
Mortality eats away at him.
277
00:32:40,932 --> 00:32:45,244
His indispensable, multi-tasking old dad had died.
278
00:32:45,332 --> 00:32:50,247
Not just his personal jack of all trades,
but his best friend.
279
00:32:50,332 --> 00:32:55,486
Other cherished intimates,
Walter Fawkes, the old radical, had gone, too.
280
00:32:58,092 --> 00:33:00,447
To keep the aches and pains at bay,
281
00:33:00,532 --> 00:33:04,047
he uses a tincture of thorn apple to cope,
282
00:33:04,132 --> 00:33:10,321
a narcotic, which probably sends his always
hyperactive visual imagination
283
00:33:10,732 --> 00:33:12,723
into planetary orbit.
284
00:33:13,932 --> 00:33:18,642
And from his bad dreams gallops a biblical horror.
285
00:33:26,732 --> 00:33:31,283
And I looked and beheld a pale horse,
286
00:33:31,372 --> 00:33:35,843
and his name that sat on him was Death,
287
00:33:35,932 --> 00:33:38,605
and Hell followed with him.
288
00:33:54,172 --> 00:33:57,562
But Turner paints his way out of the nightmare.
289
00:33:58,212 --> 00:34:02,603
Look closely, the skeleton is limp.
290
00:34:03,852 --> 00:34:06,571
Death is dead.
291
00:34:06,652 --> 00:34:10,008
Turner lives to paint on.
292
00:34:12,852 --> 00:34:17,448
He won't limply surrender
like some consumptive Romantic.
293
00:34:17,532 --> 00:34:22,686
Instead he gathers his energies,
puts his obsession to work,
294
00:34:22,772 --> 00:34:27,243
makes the cycle of life and death,
suffering and salvation,
295
00:34:27,332 --> 00:34:30,404
the theme of his greatest period of painting.
296
00:34:44,972 --> 00:34:47,884
He's deep into his middle age.
297
00:34:47,972 --> 00:34:51,726
When he stares at the waves
pounding the coast of Kent,
298
00:34:51,812 --> 00:34:56,328
he feels that rhythm of destruction and creation.
299
00:34:56,772 --> 00:34:59,286
Now, Margate might not seem to you
300
00:34:59,372 --> 00:35:03,001
much of a place to brood on historical destiny,
301
00:35:03,092 --> 00:35:07,324
but for Turner, it was definitely more
than just seaside ozone
302
00:35:07,412 --> 00:35:09,801
and a stroll along the beach.
303
00:35:34,292 --> 00:35:39,366
The sea becomes something more
than the carrier of power and wealth.
304
00:35:41,772 --> 00:35:46,402
It's the stage on which
the drama of British history gets played out.
305
00:35:50,132 --> 00:35:54,125
Sometimes that drama is fierce and turbulent,
306
00:35:54,692 --> 00:35:59,971
and sometimes it's a comforting story
for revolutionary times.
307
00:36:29,692 --> 00:36:32,889
So in the painting he calls his ''old darling'',
308
00:36:32,972 --> 00:36:37,807
he gives us romantic wistfulness
for the veteran battleship of Trafalgar,
309
00:36:37,892 --> 00:36:39,803
The Fighting Temeraire.
310
00:36:45,492 --> 00:36:48,450
The vessel is restored fictitiously
311
00:36:48,532 --> 00:36:53,526
to one last heroic farewell voyage
before being broken up.
312
00:36:54,452 --> 00:37:00,084
In Turner's picture,
its masts are still standing, its sails furled.
313
00:37:00,852 --> 00:37:03,571
But the little steam-power tug that pulls it
314
00:37:03,652 --> 00:37:06,610
isn't some sort of modern villain.
315
00:37:06,692 --> 00:37:12,005
It's simply a fact of life in the new Britain,
a nation in upheaval
316
00:37:12,092 --> 00:37:15,084
as the Industrial Revolution gathers momentum.
317
00:37:16,772 --> 00:37:20,208
And Turner has perfect pitch for a British public
318
00:37:20,292 --> 00:37:23,602
torn between affection for the past
319
00:37:23,692 --> 00:37:26,126
and anticipation of the future.
320
00:37:29,332 --> 00:37:32,768
It's so emotionally versatile, this picture,
321
00:37:32,852 --> 00:37:35,605
that it lets you indulge whatever mood takes you.
322
00:37:36,212 --> 00:37:37,850
Feel like an elegy?
323
00:37:37,932 --> 00:37:42,403
Well, fine, then this can be
the sunset of Nelson's England.
324
00:37:42,492 --> 00:37:47,327
Just made a lot of money
from an industrial patent, and feeling good?
325
00:37:47,412 --> 00:37:53,681
Fine again, this is the sunrise
of your new industrial empire.
326
00:38:00,892 --> 00:38:06,842
But Turner's restless imagination
won't settle for poignant gentleness.
327
00:38:06,932 --> 00:38:10,242
He knows the truth is more tumultuous
328
00:38:10,332 --> 00:38:14,086
and that the sea has terrible tales to tell.
329
00:38:17,972 --> 00:38:21,044
Ships in peril fill his mind,
330
00:38:21,132 --> 00:38:24,602
and those ships become an emblem
of the country.
331
00:38:24,692 --> 00:38:30,449
The oceanic deep becomes the site
on which imperial destiny unfolds,
332
00:38:30,532 --> 00:38:35,287
where British history will be wrecked,
rescued or salvaged.
333
00:38:44,772 --> 00:38:51,291
The Amphitrite was a convict ship
carrying women and children to Australia.
334
00:38:51,372 --> 00:38:53,283
But it didn't get far.
335
00:38:53,372 --> 00:38:58,048
In the Channel, off Boulogne,
the ship ran aground and began to break up.
336
00:39:08,252 --> 00:39:12,131
The French offered to land
the passengers and the crew.
337
00:39:12,212 --> 00:39:14,646
But the captain, a brutal disciplinarian,
338
00:39:14,732 --> 00:39:16,848
rejected the offer on the grounds
339
00:39:16,932 --> 00:39:22,723
he had no authority to land them anywhere
except their antipodean prison.
340
00:39:24,012 --> 00:39:29,166
The crew clung to masts and spars,
and most survived the wreck.
341
00:39:29,332 --> 00:39:33,769
But the women and children, all 125 of them,
342
00:39:33,852 --> 00:39:36,571
were swept away and drowned.
343
00:39:37,692 --> 00:39:43,449
Like his Waterloo, it's a painting of victims,
so much human flotsam and jetsam.
344
00:39:44,172 --> 00:39:47,642
But this is the bare skeleton of a masterwork.
345
00:39:47,732 --> 00:39:50,610
Turner never finished or showed it.
346
00:40:07,892 --> 00:40:11,601
But the idea behind it, cruelty at sea,
347
00:40:11,692 --> 00:40:15,844
blood, martyrdom, retribution and salvation,
348
00:40:15,932 --> 00:40:18,400
had certainly not gone away.
349
00:40:23,652 --> 00:40:29,329
It simmered and then exploded
in a sky the colour of blood.
350
00:41:15,932 --> 00:41:17,490
In the late 1830s,
351
00:41:17,572 --> 00:41:21,042
one issue galvanised British moral outrage
352
00:41:21,132 --> 00:41:24,044
more than any other.; slavery.
353
00:41:48,172 --> 00:41:51,960
Britain had outlawed slavery
throughout the Empire.
354
00:41:53,252 --> 00:41:56,642
But in the Hispanic empires and the United States,
355
00:41:56,732 --> 00:41:59,724
it not only survived, but thrived.
356
00:42:04,052 --> 00:42:08,648
In 1840, in London,
an International Convention of the Great and Good
357
00:42:08,732 --> 00:42:13,169
was planned to express
righteous indignation at this fact.
358
00:42:14,052 --> 00:42:20,287
Turner, initiated into the cause
so many years ago by his patron, Walter Fawkes,
359
00:42:20,372 --> 00:42:23,444
wanted to have his say in paint.
360
00:42:32,012 --> 00:42:34,128
And how does he do it?
361
00:42:34,932 --> 00:42:38,971
By being a thorn in the side of self-congratulation.
362
00:42:45,452 --> 00:42:51,527
Turner reaches back 60 years
to resurrect one of the most shameful episodes
363
00:42:51,612 --> 00:42:54,126
in the history of the British Empire.
364
00:43:19,932 --> 00:43:24,608
In 1781, the British slaver, the Zong,
365
00:43:24,692 --> 00:43:26,728
was off the coast of Jamaica
366
00:43:26,812 --> 00:43:30,248
after a routinely profitable journey from Africa.
367
00:43:41,612 --> 00:43:44,126
But deep below decks, there was trouble.
368
00:43:50,612 --> 00:43:54,400
Slaves were dying at more than the usual rate.
369
00:43:55,132 --> 00:44:01,128
And the ship's master, Luke Collingwood,
suddenly had a business disaster on his hands.
370
00:44:05,732 --> 00:44:10,567
His human cargo was insured,
but the underwriters would only pay up
371
00:44:10,652 --> 00:44:14,964
if the casualties could be accounted for
as losses at sea,
372
00:44:15,052 --> 00:44:17,168
not dead on arrival.
373
00:44:27,732 --> 00:44:31,247
So Captain Collingwood went below decks
374
00:44:34,452 --> 00:44:38,525
and began the merciless business
of selecting which slaves
375
00:44:38,612 --> 00:44:43,049
he would swiftly turn into ''losses at sea. ''
376
00:45:25,492 --> 00:45:30,008
132 Africans, men, women and children,
377
00:45:30,092 --> 00:45:34,449
their hands and feet fettered,
were thrown overboard
378
00:45:34,532 --> 00:45:38,002
into the shark-infested waters of the Caribbean.
379
00:45:56,252 --> 00:45:59,927
The moral horror of the case
of the Zong was the moment
380
00:46:00,012 --> 00:46:04,403
when thousands of Britons
abandoned their indifference
381
00:46:04,492 --> 00:46:07,928
and became campaigners against the slave trade.
382
00:46:25,972 --> 00:46:30,568
132 Africans perished horribly,
383
00:46:30,652 --> 00:46:34,008
but a mass movement was born
from their martyrdom.
384
00:46:42,932 --> 00:46:49,531
Turner's approach to this appalling tragedy
was not that of a literal historical illustrator.
385
00:46:51,652 --> 00:46:56,442
What the great enchanter of the canvas
wanted was, Prospero-like,
386
00:46:56,532 --> 00:47:00,730
to summon an apocalypse, a typhoon.
387
00:47:21,652 --> 00:47:24,849
The Slave Ship pitches us into the midst
388
00:47:24,932 --> 00:47:28,641
of a feverish dream of catastrophe and terror,
389
00:47:28,732 --> 00:47:31,451
sin and retribution.
390
00:47:40,692 --> 00:47:45,243
The silhouetted ship,
almost engulfed in the erupting spray,
391
00:47:45,332 --> 00:47:50,122
is both a real vessel
and something cursed and haunted,
392
00:47:50,212 --> 00:47:52,885
like the ship of the Ancient Mariner.
393
00:47:54,972 --> 00:47:58,362
Waves seethe with monsters,
394
00:47:58,452 --> 00:48:03,401
a kind of obscene piranha-like
nibbling and gobbling.
395
00:48:09,332 --> 00:48:14,406
And the oncoming fishy monster
is not to be caught off the coast of Jamaica,
396
00:48:14,492 --> 00:48:19,964
but off the canvas of Hieronymus Bosch,
Hell, in high-water.
397
00:48:28,292 --> 00:48:33,730
Of course, it has its imperfections,
all that flailing flurry of action
398
00:48:33,812 --> 00:48:38,727
in the foreground,
the mysteriously floating iron fetters,
399
00:48:38,812 --> 00:48:44,250
the flung limb that may
or may not be detached from its torso.
400
00:48:45,012 --> 00:48:49,927
All the frantic fishy action
could seem too fussily staged.
401
00:48:52,092 --> 00:48:55,641
In the end, there's only one test that matters.
402
00:48:55,732 --> 00:48:58,929
You come into the room, you fix it in your sights,
403
00:48:59,012 --> 00:49:04,006
does it or does it not attack you in the guts?
It does.
404
00:49:10,532 --> 00:49:14,207
Does your heart jump? Do your eyes widen?
Does your pulse race?
405
00:49:14,292 --> 00:49:19,685
Do your feet get a bad attack of lead boots,
you're so struck down by it?
406
00:49:19,772 --> 00:49:20,921
They do.
407
00:49:24,212 --> 00:49:28,410
For Turner has drowned you in this moment,
408
00:49:28,492 --> 00:49:31,768
pulled you into this terrifying chasm in the ocean,
409
00:49:31,852 --> 00:49:35,083
drenched you in his bloody light.
410
00:49:35,172 --> 00:49:40,451
Exactly the hue you sense
on your blood-filled optic nerves
411
00:49:40,532 --> 00:49:44,286
when you close your eyes in blinding sunlight.
412
00:49:47,492 --> 00:49:53,647
Though almost all of his critics believed
that The Slavers represented an all-time low
413
00:49:53,732 --> 00:49:57,964
in Turner's reckless disregard for the rules of art,
414
00:49:58,052 --> 00:50:03,922
it was in fact his greatest triumph
in the sculptural carving of space.
415
00:50:06,132 --> 00:50:08,805
For none of the stormy atmospherics,
416
00:50:08,892 --> 00:50:14,762
the great pinwheel fury of reds and golds,
would have the impact they did,
417
00:50:14,852 --> 00:50:19,130
were it not for that deep trough
Turner has cut in the ocean,
418
00:50:19,772 --> 00:50:25,802
which at the centre of the painting
makes the blackly heaving swells stand still
419
00:50:25,892 --> 00:50:32,206
as though the wrathful hand of Jehovah
has suddenly passed over the boiling waters.
420
00:50:36,972 --> 00:50:42,171
For this is a day of martyrdom,
retribution and judgement.
421
00:50:47,932 --> 00:50:52,687
But also a scene,
Turner must have optimistically thought,
422
00:50:52,772 --> 00:50:54,205
of vindication.
423
00:50:56,332 --> 00:50:58,971
It would be a sin redeemed.
424
00:51:01,412 --> 00:51:05,405
Slavery would be defeated.
425
00:51:07,852 --> 00:51:12,004
There is, after all, a patch of clearing blue
426
00:51:12,092 --> 00:51:14,845
at the top right corner of the painting.
427
00:51:27,172 --> 00:51:29,845
The critics went to town.
428
00:51:29,932 --> 00:51:33,242
Turner became the butt of jokes, a crackpot,
429
00:51:33,332 --> 00:51:38,167
old loon, lost in the tempest
with his ridiculous painting.
430
00:51:39,532 --> 00:51:43,411
And its even more ridiculous full title,
431
00:51:44,652 --> 00:51:49,407
Slavers,
Slave Ship Throwing Over the Dead and Dying,
432
00:51:49,492 --> 00:51:51,847
Typhoon Coming On.
433
00:51:55,652 --> 00:51:59,361
Punch magazine joined in the chorus of catcalls,
434
00:51:59,452 --> 00:52:03,570
lampooning Turner by inventing
a painting with the title,
435
00:52:03,652 --> 00:52:08,442
''A typhoon bursting a samoon
over a whirlpool maelstrom,"
436
00:52:08,612 --> 00:52:14,608
''Norway, a ship on fire,
and eclipse with the effect of a lunar rainbow. ''
437
00:52:28,812 --> 00:52:32,361
But Punch and all the other high-hat critics
438
00:52:32,452 --> 00:52:35,808
missed the one overwhelming point
439
00:52:35,892 --> 00:52:40,647
which makes this the greatest British picture
of the 19th century,
440
00:52:42,772 --> 00:52:47,482
the perfect match between message and form.
441
00:52:50,052 --> 00:52:55,001
The payoff of the slaves' martyrdom
would in the end be freedom.
442
00:53:05,932 --> 00:53:10,722
So Turner has given himself
glorious freedom with his brush
443
00:53:10,812 --> 00:53:13,724
and with his colour, and with his imagery,
444
00:53:13,812 --> 00:53:17,566
to convey the power of the sacred moment.
445
00:54:02,852 --> 00:54:06,970
Two years after the debacle of The Slave Ship,
446
00:54:07,052 --> 00:54:10,249
a young Scottish admirer, William Leighton Leitch,
447
00:54:10,332 --> 00:54:13,165
visited Turner's house in Queen Anne Street.
448
00:54:23,812 --> 00:54:27,361
He'd heard that the Turner gallery
was in disrepair,
449
00:54:27,452 --> 00:54:31,968
but nothing could possibly have prepared Leitch
for the squalor.
450
00:54:38,332 --> 00:54:44,089
I walked backwards and forwards
in the gallery, feeling cold and uncomfortable.
451
00:54:44,172 --> 00:54:46,527
There was no sound to be heard
452
00:54:46,612 --> 00:54:51,049
but the rain splashing
through the broken windows upon the floor.
453
00:54:53,452 --> 00:54:57,684
Leitch stood in the evil-smelling gloom.
454
00:54:57,772 --> 00:55:03,768
And as he peered at Turner's most recent work,
among which was hanging, somewhere,
455
00:55:03,852 --> 00:55:10,200
the scarlet explosion that was the unsold,
unwanted, unloved Slave Ship,
456
00:55:10,732 --> 00:55:13,929
he felt more and more depressed.
457
00:55:14,692 --> 00:55:18,446
But this was the moment
when the country's favourite painter,
458
00:55:18,532 --> 00:55:21,649
once revered as the patriarch of British art,
459
00:55:21,732 --> 00:55:24,963
was written off as a senile lunatic.
460
00:55:40,492 --> 00:55:45,805
Yet the effect of the critical onslaught
is to make him more, not less, brave.
461
00:55:45,892 --> 00:55:48,770
He's off on his own now, the solitary mariner
462
00:55:48,852 --> 00:55:53,209
on a completely unchartered ocean
of pure painting.
463
00:57:17,852 --> 00:57:22,642
Alongside all these scenes of oceanic turmoil,
464
00:57:22,732 --> 00:57:27,806
Turner was still capable of painting images
of exquisite liquid calm.
465
00:57:29,012 --> 00:57:32,561
But you have the feeling
he could do those in his sleep.
466
00:57:33,612 --> 00:57:36,963
It's when his whirlpool of paint resolves itself
467
00:57:36,999 --> 00:57:41,880
into something weightier and mightier
than the entertainment of the senses,
468
00:57:42,652 --> 00:57:47,680
when he reaches towards
the truths of history and eternity,
469
00:57:47,772 --> 00:57:51,082
that I think Turner is at his greatest.
470
00:57:51,932 --> 00:57:55,402
That's when he changes not just British art,
471
00:57:55,492 --> 00:57:58,723
but all of art, most completely.
472
00:58:06,892 --> 00:58:11,647
And you know, this is why
Turner still matters to us and always will.
473
00:58:11,732 --> 00:58:15,407
That old Cockney geezer
in his battered hat and filthy coat
474
00:58:15,492 --> 00:58:20,486
transports us somewhere where
the slick conformist would never dare to go.
475
00:58:20,572 --> 00:58:23,609
Into the eye of history's storm.
476
00:58:23,692 --> 00:58:25,648
Into the ocean of light.