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00:00If Joseph Mallord William Turner is famous for just one thing it's this, his sunsets.
00:10When I was a student and you know growing up in Margate you were aware of Turner,
00:16there was the blue plaques and everything and you were told about the fact there's
00:19this famous Victorian artist that came to Margate because the beautiful sunsets.
00:23Turner stands above every other British landscape painter. His name conjures up
00:31images of dramatic skies, daunting crags and wild seas. But there's another side to Turner.
00:43Machines, technology, industry, the opposite of nature. Turner was much more than a painter
00:53of lyrical landscapes. He embraced the wonders of science and progress. In the years between
01:01his birth in 1775 and his death in 1851, Britain experienced the most tumultuous
01:08upheaval in its history, the Industrial Revolution. Essentially Turner was born
01:15in the Age of Sail and he died in the Age of Steam. A new age was being created,
01:22fuelled by science and invention. Science bestowed on man powers which could almost
01:30be called creative. The chemist Humphry Davy discovered new elements. Michael Faraday
01:36harnessed the power of electricity. The connection being now made, the copper wire
01:41immediately begins to revolve around the pole of the magnet. Charles Babbage unveiled plans
01:47for the world's first computer. A machine capable of computing any table with the aid of differences.
01:54It's about finding out about the stuff of life. That feeds into technological change, new engines,
02:02new techniques, canals, tunnels, steamships, factories develop. It's an enormous span where
02:10science and technology and industry all go together. Turner was at the heart of these
02:18momentous events. He painted the Industrial Revolution as it unfolded and in the process
02:25created a whole new kind of art. He wanted to sort of instinctively see if belching smoke and a
02:33cantering train would generate that kind of beauty. He is telling his audience that it's
02:40here and my goodness it's rushing up at you. A new world was being forged and Turner more
02:47than any other painter captured what it felt like to be there.
03:04London 1807, gas lamps light up Palmau for the first time. Britain is in the middle of a
03:12scientific revolution. The phenomena of combustion, the solution of different substances in water,
03:19the agencies of fire. At the Royal Institution Humphrey Davy is the star of the show. The
03:29production of rain, hail and snow. Humphrey Davy is extraordinary. He had huge crowds. In fact
03:39Albemarle Street became the first one-way street in London because the traffic was so dense when
03:45people went to his lectures. For the first time you see potassium kind of wonderfully flaring
03:52through the crust or sodium bursting into flames on water. Barium, calcium, strontium, all new
04:00elements so the people that come along don't just come for the show they come to go away thinking
04:06that they are at the forefront of knowledge. This is the world in which Turner finds himself as a
04:13young painter at the beginning of the 19th century. He's fascinated by the visual manifestation of
04:22scientific discovery. These ideas were bubbling up around him. People met, they talked with the
04:32same aim in view which was understanding and discovering what goes on around us. These ideas
04:42began to fire him up.
04:56The Fighting Temeraire, the nation's favourite painting. Turner painted it towards the end of
05:03his life when he was 64 and it captures on canvas the extraordinary journey the world had taken over
05:10the course of his lifetime. So the painting is of the Temeraire being towed from Sheerness to
05:20Rotherhithe. It's on its last ever voyage. It's this great Leviathan of the age of sail being towed
05:27up the Thames into the heart of London by a steam tug. The moon is rising on one side of the ship
05:35and on the far side of the steamer we have the Sun in a big explosion of fiery red.
05:40For the Victorian public who first saw this painting the Temeraire was a ship that had
05:48symbolised the best and worst of Nelson's Navy. She'd been one of the bravest battleships in the
05:55British fleet with a story that began in 1802 not in glory but in disgrace.
06:01A lot of the English sailors aboard her, they'd been fighting basically for nine years and they
06:12just wanted to go home and they weren't allowed to. They thought it was their right but in fact
06:16it wasn't. The mutineers were flogged and the leaders of the mutiny, they were all hanged.
06:23From infamous beginnings the Temeraire went on to become a national treasure because of this.
06:31Trafalgar. The British attacked in two columns, the Temeraire sailed just behind Nelson. Nelson,
06:39his ship the Victory, was immediately attacked. It was at this moment that Nelson was shot.
06:45Captain of the Temeraire, he saw the Victory in trouble and piled straight in.
06:51So it was unmistakably heroic what they did, putting themselves right in the heat of the
06:58action. After the peace with France was declared, ships like that came to the end of their useful
07:13life until finally the Admiralty decided there was no further use for it and it needed to be
07:19broken up. So what you're looking at is a tugboat owned by the shipbreaker, Beatston,
07:27pulling the Temeraire upriver towards its final destination at Rotherhithe.
07:33What Turner's got there is this sort of sense of a ghost, of a, you know, a veteran ghost of
07:41something grand and epic in British life. So it's coming to its last moment but it's
07:47being pulled there by this tough little iron tugboat.
07:51The Temeraire, when she came from Sheerness up to Rotherhithe, was a very sad hulk. She had no
08:03masts at all. She was literally falling apart. But what Turner does is he paints her almost like
08:09she appeared in her glory days. He's deliberately doing that to make such a visible, important
08:15contrast between this steam tug that's pulling her along and the great sailing warships as they
08:22would have appeared in their pomp. I see it also as a combination of noise and silence that you
08:33feel the thrashing of the wheels going round in the water and the sound of the engine,
08:37the smoke coming out of the funnel, indicating all that kind of clanking industrial bustle
08:42you associate with the new technology. And behind it, you just hear the ripple of this
08:49other ship being turned silently to its doom. Many people, when it was exhibited, saw it as
08:57a sort of elegy for the passing of the age of sail and its replacement by the new technology of steam.
09:04This is the time when the top guns of Victorian polemic are saying that we are damned if we
09:15become prisoners of the machine age. Our Christianity is at peril. Our national
09:20character is at peril. We can no longer be moral to each other. Turner didn't feel like
09:27that at all, and the Victorian public didn't want to feel like that at all.
09:31I don't think it is sad. It seems to me to be a familial picture, as if this young,
09:40tubby steam tug is the new generation, which is guiding some Mishavisham-like ghost of the past.
09:48He called the painting My Old Darling, so he knew somehow this was the one that made people happy,
09:56because it did actually make them feel good about the fact they weren't just relying and
10:02leaning on wonderful memories of faded glory. The faded glory was being pulled on by an equally
10:09tough, glorious, solid, black, energised future. Steamships are, in Turner, a symbol of the modern
10:27world. Turner really embraced the idea of steam. I think that's incontrovertible.
10:35While there are very many wrecked sailing ships in Turner, there are no wrecked steamships.
10:46Steamships are everywhere. Turner's sketchbooks are really quite extraordinary. He kept them all
10:58his life. He often kept several of them in his pocket at the same time. And this is a steamer.
11:05Just off a harbour. And quite typically, Turner's added a couple of little colour notes for himself,
11:13just to remind himself of the effect. So where the smoke is fading away, he marks G for grey.
11:21And of course it's not a composition, it's just a very quick record of something seen,
11:27and these sketchbooks are full of little memoranda like that. Turner was absolutely
11:33a chronicler of his times. He was interested in everything that was going on around him,
11:38and of course this was what made him such a wonderful portrayer of the Britain of his day.
11:44In the 1820s, international steam travel arrived, and Turner was one of the first to record it.
11:56In Dover, a steamer chugs merrily out to sea, while oarsmen puff and pant in the foreground.
12:02Steamboats were soon a regular sight around the coast of Britain.
12:09It must have been a great relief to get on a modern steamer, instead of the old heaving buoys that used to make
12:15everybody horrendously seasick, and took hours and hours to get there. It would have been a very exciting thing.
12:22But the world into which Turner was born couldn't have been more different.
12:33He came from another era, 18th century Georgian England.
12:38Turner was born in 1775, the same year as Jane Austen. His father was a barber and
12:47wig maker who practiced his trade in Covent Garden.
12:52It's an area where, because of theatre, beginnings of opera and all that world, society is coming,
12:59and good society and dodgy society.
13:04Turner's dad was very ambitious for him. He was very keen that Turner should make money.
13:09He said that his father never praised him for anything other than saving a ha'penny,
13:15which seems to have left its mark on Turner's character, because he became somewhat notoriously mean with money throughout his life.
13:23It was obvious from quite early on that Turner was very gifted.
13:31The good thing about his father having a barber's business was that lots of different sorts of people would come in there
13:37to have their hair trimmed or their faces shaved, and we know that some of the people who came in got to see Turner's work.
13:45One person who's known to have frequented the barber shop was Thomas Stottard,
13:51and Thomas Stottard was actually a member of the Royal Academy.
13:55He was a painter, and Turner's father once remarked to Stottard, the Royal Academician...
14:00My son is going to be a painter.
14:06And he did. He joined the Royal Academy schools at the age of 14.
14:16Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy, was in charge, and Turner absolutely revered Reynolds.
14:24The great aim to all arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feelings.
14:30The imitation of nature frequently does this. Sometimes it fails, and something else succeeds.
14:39You know, he was a scholarship boy, got into the Royal Academy school, he's sort of upwardly mobile through his wits,
14:45and you could, at that time, be such a person. And then he's on his way.
14:51The Academy in those days wasn't what we think of an art school being now.
14:56You weren't taught to paint at all. It was a drawing school. And you were very much on your own, in a way.
15:05I wish you were to be persuaded that success in your art depends almost entirely on your own industry.
15:15And that industry, I principally recommend, is not the industry of the hands, but of the mind.
15:24He taught himself to paint in oils, and at the age of 21, in 1796, he exhibited his first oil painting at the Royal Academy,
15:34and it was called Fisherman at Sea. It was an absolutely virtuoso piece of painting.
15:44It was almost as if he'd waited till he completely mastered oil painting, and then demonstrated exactly what he could do.
15:55You know, I mean, if one thinks of an artist like Constable, he had to battle for years to get taken seriously,
16:01and was really an incredibly slow burner, compared to Turner, who came roaring onto the scene,
16:06and then continued to occupy the centre ground for the rest of his life.
16:14I think by the time he painted the self-portrait, he probably felt he really had arrived.
16:18And it's a very flattering self-portrait. I mean, Turner didn't like his own appearance.
16:23He was quite short, quite rough in his manners, strong Cockney accent, which he never got rid of, never wanted to get rid of it.
16:32He was very pushy, very self-assertive, very ambitious, but he had the talent to go with it.
16:41I would chiefly recommend an implicit obedience to the rules of art, as established by the great masters...
16:49Reynolds appointed Turner towards certain painters who he regarded were models of great painting.
16:56...that the practice of the Frenchman Claude Lorrain is to be adopted...
17:01He would recommend the 17th century French painters, Claude in particular.
17:08Claude was regarded as the absolute master of light in landscape.
17:16Claude painted classical scenes of gods and nymphs frolicking in nature.
17:22Ironically, it would be Claude, a painter of a mythical past,
17:26who would inspire Turner to paint the industrial Britain of the 19th century.
17:32Turner certainly loved Claude's paintings.
17:35There's a famous story of him as a young man going to a collector's house and seeing paintings by Claude and bursting into tears.
17:44He said, I shall never paint like that.
17:48But of course, as time went by, he did paint like that.
17:51He started to think about how he could apply the lessons of Claude's art to something appropriate to his own age.
18:05This is Turner's version of a Claude.
18:08Young women bathe in a pastoral setting.
18:11It looks in every way like a Claude.
18:14Except this is not the mythical past.
18:17It's Devon in 1815.
18:20And the Industrial Revolution is about to transform the landscape.
18:25If you look very, very carefully, you'll see an enormous water wheel.
18:31And this is the wheel for Gunnys Lake Old Mine, which was the biggest copper mine in the world at the time.
18:38So he paints this picture of the most Claudean scene he can find in England, as though he were a modern Claude.
18:45But unlike Claude, he includes in the middle of it a scene of modern industries.
19:01Ten years later, and Turner's hint of an industrial Britain becomes an onslaught.
19:07A Claudean seaport transformed into the fires and furnaces of modern Britain.
19:16It's the most resolutely industrial scene of coal being loaded on board a ship
19:22to be taken from Northumbria and Coalfields to the rest of Britain.
19:26This is a moonlight scene, but this is modern industry on the Tyne.
19:32Industry never stops. It's a 24-hour productive effort.
19:36And this is about industrial might.
19:39These are the reasons that the England that Turner lives in has become that very place.
19:46It's because industry is a transforming factor in the world.
19:51And his picture is a response to that.
19:56I think Turner was very excited by this kind of progress
20:00and also its potential for him as an artist to make pictures.
20:09Keelman is a modern British equivalent of a classical Claude seaport.
20:16It's a tradition brought up to date.
20:20Claude's seaport paintings were very distinctive
20:23because you were invariably looking to the source of light, which was the sun,
20:28and you had parallel lines going off towards a vanishing point,
20:32and that was the way they were structured.
20:35And the structure that he uses for this very, very modern subject
20:41is essentially a Claudean structure.
20:45If you wanted to renovate the Claudean tradition,
20:49you're saying effectively that Claude understood something about landscape.
20:54This is how to compose, how to deal with light.
20:57But the Britain of the middle of the 19th century
21:01is no longer peopled with nymphs and gods.
21:04It's peopled with industry and the people who work in it.
21:08But this momentous scene could never have existed
21:11without one pursuit that had dominated the age.
21:14Science.
21:22Somerset House in London
21:24was home not just to the Royal Academy for Artists
21:27but also the Royal Society for Scientists.
21:31In the 18th century,
21:34In the early 1800s,
21:36there was no great divide between art and science like there is today.
21:40They shared the same building.
21:42The intellectual world was much smaller.
21:44You'd meet at the same parties,
21:46you'd discuss the same ideas,
21:48you'd go to the same salons.
21:50There wasn't this separation of cultures
21:52between the arts and sciences
21:54so that, you know, on one side of the wall,
21:57there might be painters having a dinner
21:59and then, you know, two rooms down the corridor.
22:02We have reason to look upon the sun
22:05as a most magnificent, opaque globe
22:08possessed of an atmosphere
22:10in which luminous clouds ever-varying...
22:13In April 1801,
22:15just as Turner was hanging his next big seascape,
22:18on the other side of the wall at the Royal Society,
22:21legendary astronomer William Herschel
22:24was giving a lecture on the sun.
22:28In order to obtain as intimate a knowledge of the sun,
22:31it is obvious that the first step
22:33must be to become well-acquainted
22:35with all the phenomena that appear on its surface.
22:38Openings.
22:40Flats.
22:42Ridges.
22:44Nodules.
22:46Crankers.
22:48Shallows.
22:50Dimples.
22:52And punctures.
22:55Herschel's lecture on the sun was published immediately
22:58and it was at this point
23:00that Turner also began to look at the sun in a new way.
23:04Even here, in this most Claudean of landscapes,
23:07is evidence of the latest scientific thinking.
23:10Young women dance around celebrating a new harvest.
23:13It looks like another Claude,
23:15except for one thing...
23:17the sun.
23:19There are many, many, many examples
23:22in Turner, throughout his life,
23:25of new science-triggering ideas.
23:30In a sense, Herschel allows
23:33the way Turner paints the sun in the Macron.
23:36Without Herschel's observations,
23:39Turner might not have really thought about it.
23:42That was the trigger.
23:44If you look closely at the picture,
23:47it does seem to have incorporated
23:51ideas that were announced.
23:54The way the paint is actually applied,
23:57there's a sort of ridge in it,
24:00seems to be taking Herschel's discovery
24:03and manifesting it in paint.
24:06Whereas Turner's great hero, Claude,
24:09would paint the sun as a yellow disc hanging in the sky,
24:13Turner paints slashes of little,
24:16little sharp lines.
24:19Turner is noted throughout his career
24:22for making the sun a very physical object,
24:25of using impasto, which is thick paint
24:28that sticks up, if you look at a canvas sideways,
24:31it would stick up like a boss of a shield,
24:34to bring the sun as a physical object
24:37very much closer to the spectator's attention.
24:40For the first time in painting,
24:43I think we can say,
24:47he sees the sun as a real object,
24:50but something that you simply cannot look at
24:53without damaging your eyes.
24:56We are being blinded by that sun.
25:01When I was a boy, I used to lie for hours on my back
25:04watching the skies and then go home and paint them.
25:07And there was a stall in Soho Bazaar
25:10where they sold drawing materials,
25:13and they used to buy my skies.
25:17I'm free-shitting sixpence for the larger ones.
25:20There's many a young lady who's got my sky for her drawing.
25:26Turner's sketchbook from 1804
25:29contains a record of the stages of an eclipse.
25:32But it's not just the heavens that were being analysed.
25:35Turner was absorbing developments
25:38in the understanding of the weather.
25:41In December 1802, a young Quaker called Luke Howard
25:44gave a lecture to a small group of scientists in London.
25:47It would become a landmark moment
25:50in the creation of modern meteorology.
25:56My talk this evening is concerned with
25:59what may strike some
26:02as an uncharacteristically impractical subject.
26:05He decided to give his talk on a subject
26:08which had preoccupied him for many years.
26:12His lecture to an amateur science club
26:15was going to make him famous.
26:18It is concerned with the modification of clouds.
26:21If clouds were merely the result
26:24of the condensation of vapour in the atmosphere,
26:27then indeed might the study of them
26:30be deemed a useless pursuit of shadows.
26:33But the case is not so with clouds.
26:38Howard made the simple but penetrating observation
26:41that there are many shapes and varieties of cloud
26:44but only three basic forms, which he called...
26:47Cirrus, Cumulus, Stratus.
26:52Before that time, people thought
26:55that each cloud was somehow unique and on its own.
26:58And what Howard did was give a basic grounding
27:01to the science of meteorology.
27:04Turner would have known of Howard's classification
27:07because everybody did.
27:11He would have known of the artist's manuals
27:14already by the 1810s and 20s.
27:22Hereafter, I shall estimate the force of the wind
27:25according to the following scale.
27:28Nought, calm.
27:31One, faint breeze or just not a calm.
27:34Two, light air.
27:37The sun was being mapped,
27:41and in 1806, a ship's captain called Francis Beaufort
27:44measured the wind.
27:49He came up with a fantastically simple idea.
27:52Instead of simply having a list of wind strengths
27:55from one light breeze to 12 hurricane,
27:58why not measure the effects that those winds have
28:01on the sails of a ship?
28:04That was a brilliant insight.
28:07It used a visual sign for creating
28:10a way of understanding weather.
28:13Beaufort's scale, it's been amended a little bit,
28:16but essentially, it's still with us.
28:19Southwest 5 to 7,
28:22becoming cyclonic gale 8 or severe gale 9,
28:25occasionally storm 10 in Portland and Plymouth.
28:28Well, you can't look at a painting by Turner
28:31and say, well, that was a showery day in 1831.
28:34But what you can look at Turner's paintings and see
28:38is his fascination with the weather,
28:41which is what everybody was feeling at that time.
28:47The root of that feeling
28:50is what philosophers called the sublime,
28:53an obsession with the powerful forces of nature.
28:56It was the big idea
28:59for Turner and other Romantic painters
29:02in the early 1800s.
29:05The sublime was a category of art
29:08which represented nature
29:11at its most terrifying and intimidating.
29:14Turner was fascinated
29:17with those aspects of nature
29:20that showed how fragile human life was,
29:23and this was a common Romantic theme.
29:30The idea that we humans are in awe
29:33of what the world can do,
29:36the volcanoes and hurricanes and floods and vast expanses,
29:39all of that.
29:42The category was defined in 1757
29:45by the philosopher Edmund Burke,
29:48and Edmund Burke set out to explain
29:51why it was that we should be fascinated
29:54by things in pictures that would terrify us
29:57if we encountered them in real life.
30:04It's about being excited by high mountains,
30:07by a sense of scale and mystery
30:10in the world around us,
30:13and being taken to a point
30:16where you are almost on the brink, perhaps,
30:19of being destroyed,
30:22certainly on the edge of being terrified.
30:25The sublime, the terrible, is also beautiful.
30:29But Turner, unlike any other painter,
30:32would take the idea of the sublime
30:35and recast it for the industrial age.
30:40This is his Bell Rock lighthouse.
30:43The sea is wild and dangerous.
30:46It's everything a picture of the sublime should be,
30:49except for one thing, the lighthouse.
30:52Man is not submitting to the power of nature.
30:55He's challenging it with technology.
30:58The lighthouse was built between 1807 and 1811
31:02by the Scottish engineer Robert Stevenson,
31:05who commissioned Turner to paint it.
31:08Well, this is Robert Stevenson's classic account
31:11of building the Bell Rock lighthouse.
31:14Well, this is a very special one,
31:17with its water stains and all,
31:20because this is Robert Stevenson's own creation.
31:23This is Robert Stevenson's own copy,
31:26and the chief item in the book is the frontispiece.
31:30And for this, he approached J.M.W. Turner.
31:34And the Bell Rock's this great big lump that you can see here.
31:38That is the rock, 11 miles from Arbroath
31:41and about the same distance from St Andrews.
31:45In 1799, something like 70 ships were wrecked
31:50in the vicinity of the Bell Rock lighthouse.
31:53Most of the boats at that time, they were wooden ships,
31:56and you can imagine the effect of that striking a rock.
32:00Stevenson wanted to build a lighthouse
32:03in an almost impossible situation.
32:06It was only at low tide you could actually get onto the rock,
32:11so the rock would totally disappear at high water.
32:16What made Stevenson's lighthouse special
32:19was not just its location, but also its revolutionary shape.
32:24A curved base calculated precisely
32:27to withstand the forces of the sea.
32:30It's almost unbelievable that it was successful,
32:34and everything about this job was innovative.
32:40When Turner finished his watercolour,
32:42he sent it to Stevenson to be engraved for the book.
32:46If you look closely at the watercolour,
32:49the waves that are breaking on the lighthouse
32:52come up and almost grip it like a hand.
32:55And there's a bit of wreckage in the foreground.
32:58These are indices of just how dangerous this spot actually is.
33:04But the ships in Turner's picture are not sinking.
33:09They're surviving.
33:11The lighthouse is protecting them.
33:16Turner understood precisely what these things stood for,
33:19that built properly, they were going to save hundreds,
33:22and over years, thousands of lives.
33:25Here you have something that is a demonstration of human ingenuity
33:30in the face of an untamed sea.
33:34This engineering marvel marks a turning point in Turner's art.
33:39From now on, the Sublime would not just be about the power of nature,
33:43it would also be about humanity's inventive ways of challenging it.
33:55This painting by Turner looks at first glance like a classic shipwreck.
34:00But again, Turner has incorporated new technology in an age-old scene.
34:07This painting depicts an invention by a man called George William Manby.
34:13And it shows here this puff of air which has fired a shot
34:18which is attached to a rope out to a shipwreck.
34:21And they're going to pull that rope tight
34:24and they're going to try and ferry people to shore.
34:27It was painted in 1831,
34:29the year that Manby was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
34:33And Turner always had his eyes on the newspapers.
34:36Manby was front-page news, and that, I think, is why Turner's painted it.
34:41Turner met him through a patron, a Yarmouth patron called Dawson Turner,
34:46who's no relation, but, you know, I mean,
34:49Turner obviously admired this man, admired his work.
34:53It's one of those paintings in which human ingenuity
34:57triumphs over the power of the sea.
35:02Manby was a barrackmaster at Yarmouth,
35:05and Yarmouth was renowned for being a very, very dangerous coast.
35:09And in 1807, we know that Manby witnessed the ship, the Snipe,
35:14going aground on this sandbar.
35:18And he was horrified.
35:21And he was horrified by it.
35:23He could hear the cries of the shipwrecked sailors.
35:27And the next day, he came down to the beach
35:30and there were 144 corpses that had been washed up.
35:37No-one could do anything to save those people,
35:40and Manby decided he was the man to solve this problem.
35:45A rope, so as to communicate in such circumstances with a ship.
35:51And a portable mortar,
35:54the better to ensure a prompt and effectual communication
35:58at a period when each successive incident
36:01was big with the fate of an entire ship's company.
36:05And this is all brilliant kind of stuff that Turner loved.
36:09Everyone was talking about Manby and his rather crazy invention.
36:15The entire coast of Great Britain, I hope,
36:19will be guarded with this additional belt of sucker.
36:22And I am not without the exhilarating hope
36:26of living to that day when my project
36:29shall be hailed as the seaman's best friend!
36:36Lots of people were saved by his device,
36:39though one wonders exactly what terrors people had to go through
36:43between the ship and the shore.
36:46If you think about the sublime, and in this case,
36:49you know, raging winds, tempestuous seas,
36:52here you have a device that can't overcome them,
36:56but can give us a fighting chance among them.
37:04Turley's embrace of new technology
37:06was not just there in the subjects of his paintings,
37:09it was in the very paint itself.
37:12He discussed pigment recipes with the scientist Michael Faraday,
37:17new fiery reds and chrome yellows, the colours of industry.
37:22He was also interested in the geometric rules of art.
37:26Since 1811, he'd been giving a series of lectures
37:29at the Royal Academy on perspective.
37:32He gave the audience a great deal of pleasure
37:36by providing beautiful diagrams showing perspective in action.
37:41It has often been advanced that the study of perspective
37:45is a drudgery and a toil.
37:47While the observation of nature is pleasant all in which it must be abetted,
37:51but we are not always so happily placed as to be able to consult...
37:56The problem for Turner was that despite his pugnacious self-confidence,
38:01when it came to performing in public, he was a disaster.
38:05To these rules, perspective lies an undivided claim.
38:08The trouble was he wasn't a very good speaker.
38:10The lectures really exposed his cockney accent.
38:15It often happens that they prevent the completion of greater concerns
38:20and therefore I must wave saying I'm ready...
38:23And this was thought to be not quite the thing.
38:26It was thought to reflect a bit badly on the Academy.
38:30Impetuosity of genius travels on without a guide
38:33that too often finds itself in doubt...
38:35There is an embarrassment in his manner
38:37approaching almost unintelligibility
38:40and a vulgarity of pronunciation astonishing
38:43in an artist of his rank and respectability.
38:47Next illustration, please.
38:49Mathematics he perpetually called mythematics and so on.
38:55Certainly he wouldn't have taken it very kindly
38:58if his friends had given him any advice,
39:01so really he just blundered on.
39:03Sir Joshua left a future art fully enriched and...
39:08His audience began to drift away,
39:10but one person who remained there was Turner's father.
39:14But it is the lot of all to follow and mine is a humble one.
39:21Turner's father was his closest ally.
39:24He was his guide and his companion.
39:27His mother, though, was a different story.
39:30She was a family secret.
39:35There's some evidence from relatively early in Turner's life
39:40that his mother was accused of having, quote,
39:43an ungovernable temper.
39:45His mum is going crazy.
39:47She's really loose cannon at many times, so well led to believe.
39:53And Turner has to incarcerate her.
39:56He has to effectively section her.
40:01Turner's mother was committed to Bedlam Hospital.
40:06Whether she was clinically insane, we simply don't know.
40:10What we do know, however, and this is, I think,
40:13a stain on Turner's reputation, and his father's for that matter,
40:16is that they could have elected
40:19a more humane private treatment for her, and they didn't.
40:26SINGING CONTINUES
40:32The very year his mother was incarcerated,
40:35Turner left home and moved to Harley Street,
40:38home to rich connoisseurs and patrons.
40:43She died in 1804 in Bedlam.
40:48This was not something, I think, that Turner was very keen
40:53for people to know as he was moving up the ladder in his profession.
41:03There's one very small, unpoignant profile drawing
41:08of a woman in a mob cap in an early sketchbook.
41:12She's off guard, she's musing, she's looking down.
41:17I think that might well be her.
41:23You know, with the mother gone, Dad comes to live with Turner,
41:27you know, he mixes his paints for him.
41:30So it is the kind of, you know, me and me old dad kind of cockney thing.
41:37Turner never married, and so his father, as time went on,
41:41gave up the shop and became the person who looked after Turner.
41:47As a personality, Turner was quite complex, very complex.
41:52His relationship with women was not at all conventional.
41:56He had a liaison with a widow of a musician called Sarah Danby,
42:01and she bore him two daughters,
42:03but he doesn't seem to have been a particularly doting parent.
42:08They were maintained at a separate residence.
42:13As far as his character was concerned,
42:15it really depended who you talked to.
42:20When the French romantic painter Delacroix met Turner in 1832,
42:24he described him as uncouth,
42:27like an English farmer, he said, with a hard, cold demeanour.
42:32Constable, who admired Turner's art, didn't like him either.
42:36But Turner was never going to fit in with his fellow romantics,
42:40either as a person or as an artist.
42:46This is his picture of a factory in the West Midlands.
42:50For the romantics, factories were the dark side of progress,
42:54but for Turner, they were a source of inspiration.
42:59He coaxes the most exquisite, beautiful pictorial effect
43:03out of the blast furnaces of industrial Dudley.
43:11Those people who visited Dudley, especially literary commentators,
43:15were often appalled by what they saw.
43:18Dickens was horrified by the black country
43:21and the effects of industrialisation.
43:24But what Turner is representing
43:26are not what Blake described as the dark, satanic mills.
43:31It is an image which certainly doesn't criticise
43:35the Industrial Revolution in any way.
43:38When Turner paints industry,
43:40he does paint it in an unjudgmental way, yes,
43:43and I don't think that kind of romantic nostalgia
43:47that we perhaps tend to get rather obsessed with nowadays
43:50really occurred to Turner at all.
43:52If you went into the valleys and you went into the industrial cities,
43:56there it was, there was industry, this was now, this was progress,
44:00this was the modern world.
44:03The modern world in 1842 looked like this.
44:08A steamboat in a vortex of rain and snow.
44:11And Turner is doing something extraordinary.
44:14His painting has become loose, less figurative,
44:18more atmospheric, less solid.
44:22It's perhaps one of the most extreme pictures he ever showed.
44:27You cannot tell where the sea ends
44:30and the air begins.
44:34It has no side, no middle, nothing to hold on to.
44:39The only solid thing is this little steamboat.
44:45But this isn't just a boat in a storm.
44:48There are other forces at work in this painting.
44:51There's an order in the chaos,
44:54an order which has everything to do with the scientific discoveries
44:58that were changing our understanding of nature.
45:02It all begins with the scientist Michael Faraday.
45:07In 1821, he demonstrated the theory of magnetic rotation
45:11with the world's first electric motor.
45:14The connection being now made from the plates to the copper wire
45:17and to the mercury below,
45:19the copper wire immediately begins to revolve
45:22around the pole of the magnet.
45:24A decade later, Faraday showed that an electric current
45:28could be generated through exposure to a magnetic field.
45:31The relation which holds between the fixed magnetic pole,
45:35the moving wire or metal, and the direction of the current evolves.
45:39At the same time, Turner and Faraday's friend,
45:42the mathematician Mary Somerville,
45:44was introducing the idea of electromagnetism to a wider public
45:48in a best-selling book.
45:51Dr Faraday observes that such is the facility
45:54with which electricity is evolved by the Earth's magnetism
45:58that scarcely any piece of metal can be moved in contact with others.
46:04Turner knew Mary Somerville very well indeed.
46:07They were good friends.
46:09Mary Somerville talked many times of going to Turner's studio
46:13and always being welcomed.
46:16Even a ship passing over the surface of the water
46:19in northern or southern latitudes
46:21ought to have electric currents running directly
46:24across the line of her motion.
46:26Curious electromagnetic combinations probably exist
46:30which have never yet been noticed.
46:35What is Turner doing in Snowstorm?
46:38Is he describing just the kind of things
46:41Somerville and Faraday were talking about?
46:45Is this the visual manifestation
46:47of the invisible magnetic forces in nature?
46:52The key point for Snowstorm, in my view,
46:56is the visual parallel that it creates
47:00between the sea as a vast uncontrollable force
47:05and the invisible powers of the Earth's magnetism.
47:09Underneath the chaos, there's a real regularity.
47:14The waves have a sort of a hairy quality
47:18that gets very near the effect
47:21of putting iron filings in a magnetic field with a bar magnet,
47:26how they gather around the bar magnet.
47:29I think there's a direct connection.
47:32Magnetism was in the air.
47:36Michael Faraday was working on it.
47:39Turner and Faraday had conversations.
47:41Their mutual friend, Mary Somerville,
47:44was beginning to write about these and other scientific topics
47:49and making them much more publicly accessible.
47:54All these things go together and suddenly Snowstorm appears.
48:00It's the idea of a ship as the focus of all this massive energy.
48:08This isn't a scientific diagram.
48:11Turner's not trying to explain the Earth's magnetism,
48:15but he's trying to express what this power is.
48:20We are looking at a visual metaphor.
48:24Turner had found a new way of painting.
48:27He'd created a visual language to express nature's hidden forces.
48:34Whatever he's understood about magnetism and about science,
48:38the key thing he's taken from it
48:40is an understanding of flux and of dynamism.
48:43And if you stand in front of the snowstorm
48:46and look at that tilted horizon and look at that vortex,
48:50you realise that you yourself have been caught up in that same rhythm.
49:01By 1840, Turner, now in his 60s, was making regular trips to Margate,
49:06a seaside town on the Kent coast.
49:09He'd been visiting Margate since his childhood.
49:12Now it was a second home.
49:14The thing about Margate is, Margate is very gritty
49:17and it has really strange light and amazing sunsets
49:21and it's very...it's got a lot of fecundity in the atmosphere.
49:25There's something sexy about it.
49:27And I think artists and people pick up on that.
49:30In Margate, Turner settled in with a new mistress, Mrs Booth.
49:35This may be a picture of her.
49:38It's part of a stash of inventory.
49:41Of course, when he became close to Mrs Booth, his landlady in Margate,
49:46he used to call himself Handel Booth
49:49and pretend to be a retired naval man.
49:52There are stories of late in life when he was getting more and more reclusive.
49:56If he took a cab, he would get it to drop him off several streets away
50:00so that people wouldn't discover his real identity.
50:03Turner loved to cultivate this air of mystery.
50:06Few people were allowed to see him at work.
50:09But one artist who did was Edward Rippingill,
50:12who witnessed Turner putting the final touches to one of his paintings.
50:18In one part of the mysterious proceedings,
50:21Turner, who worked all the way up to the end of his life,
50:24was shown a picture of his mistress, Mrs Booth.
50:29In one part of the mysterious proceedings,
50:32Turner, who worked almost entirely with his palette knife,
50:35was observed to be rolling and spreading
50:38a lump of half-transparent stuff over his picture.
50:41What is that he's blastering his picture with?
50:44Presently, the work was finished.
50:46Turner gathered his tools together
50:49and then, with his face still to the wall, went sliding off.
50:54All it was for these witnesses was a master magician
50:58doing something that they couldn't comprehend.
51:01OK, you want to see how it's done, here's how it's done.
51:11This is how it was done in 1844.
51:15One of Turner's last great oil paintings.
51:18A train hurtling out of the canvas into the future.
51:23It's all there in this one extraordinary picture.
51:26The scientific discoveries, the engineering breakthroughs,
51:29the industrial upheavals come together
51:32in Turner's vision of the New Britain.
51:35It's about atmosphere.
51:37A train crossing a bridge, puffing out smoke and soot
51:41on a rather wet, misty day in the Thames Valley.
51:46Just the title, Rain, Steam and Speed,
51:49everything pouring, you know, it's kind of like, it's exciting.
51:53It's hitting the same note as Temeraire,
51:56so you have the kind of, the world of old motion
52:00drifting along in that little boat,
52:02while it's...
52:04It's sort of coming along.
52:07The firebox has almost eaten through
52:10the casing of the engine chassis as it roars towards you.
52:19This is the Great Western Railway.
52:21This is Brunel's fantastic engineering achievement.
52:26It's the jewel in the crown of the railway system.
52:31The railway bridge over which the train is going
52:34is Isambard Kingdom Brunel's.
52:38So it is a homage to one of the defining figures of Victorian Britain.
52:44When this picture is painted, we're just about a decade and a half
52:48into the history of the railways.
52:50I mean, remember, before the railways arrived,
52:53nobody had gone faster than a horse could gallop,
52:56and now we have these railways that, even by 1844,
52:59when this picture is done, are going 30, 40 miles an hour,
53:02and they're soon to go 50, 60 miles an hour.
53:05Unheard-of speeds.
53:08It really is transformational.
53:12The Great Western was even responsible for standardising time.
53:17There was a time difference between, say, Exeter and London
53:20of about 15, 20 minutes,
53:22because it was set by the rising of the sun.
53:27And it was thanks to the Great Western that we have Greenwich Mean Time.
53:37And if you look very closely,
53:39there is a hare that's running for its life in front of the train.
53:47I mean, the hare is, in Britain anyway, the fastest natural animal.
53:53So you've got this contrast between the modern industrial speedy machine
53:58and the natural speedy animal.
54:03The train in Rain, Steam and Speed is not just a train rushing at us,
54:08but it's also a reminder of the modern world
54:11and how the modern world is changing the landscape.
54:16Changing society.
54:18Changing individual lives.
54:21The coming of the railway is the destruction of many, many homes
54:25of ordinary people, especially building the stations in London
54:28and in all the cities, driving through Old England.
54:33The people that most resented it are by now the sort of ageing romantics
54:37like Wordsworth and Ruskin,
54:39who feared that these hordes would invade their beauteous landscapes.
54:43But Turner's painting is a great cheer for Brunel, I think.
54:48When the novelist and art critic William Thackeray
54:51first saw Rain, Steam and Speed,
54:53he knew he was looking at something completely new in painting.
55:01The rain in the astounding picture
55:04is composed of dabs of dirty putty slapped onto the canvas with a trowel.
55:09The sunshine scintillates out of very thick, smeary lumps of chrome yellow.
55:16The world has never seen anything like this picture.
55:22He's using paint to make us feel what it was like to be there.
55:25I mean, Thackeray commented on the fact
55:27that when you got up close to the picture,
55:29you really couldn't get away from the thickness of the paint.
55:34We shouldn't say that only Impressionism and the modern movement
55:38had these revelations.
55:40I think what makes Turner extraordinary
55:42is that he came upon these understandings in the 19th century.
55:47Look at the rest of the Victorian painting around this time,
55:50including mates of his like Wilkie, who he loved.
55:53I mean, it's pathetically rudimentary and laborious and literal.
55:58The notion that you, as a fellow, you know, of the Royal Academy,
56:03would make this kind of maelstrom of paint and deliver it as art.
56:07You tell me, who else is doing that? No, the answer is no-one.
56:11It isn't simply nice little curlicues of smoke coming out of a funnel.
56:15It's somebody who understands how steam power has harnessed heat
56:21and turned it into motion.
56:24Nobody else had found a way of painting that transformation.
56:30He wanted to sort of instinctively see
56:33if belching smoke and a cantering train
56:36would generate that kind of beauty.
56:41What he does is the industrial sublime.
56:45It's a kind of modernisation, perhaps, of the sublime.
56:48It's making it applicable to a modern age,
56:51which is making scientific and technological advances
56:55and is learning to harness nature.
56:59You know, the sublime usually presupposes
57:02the intrusion of something mechanical as the enemy.
57:05It's not the enemy for Turner.
57:09The most atmospheric of all of Turner's paintings,
57:12where all the elements come together,
57:15earth, air, fire and water, becomes a celebration of progress.
57:21For Turner, industry becomes the sublime.
57:29It's as though those natural forces
57:32have been harnessed by mankind for their own betterment.
57:37The volcanoes and hurricanes
57:39that might traditionally be associated with the sublime
57:42now occur inside boilers and drive pistons.
57:47No-one had thought like that, painted like that, imagined it like that.
57:51And it's not going to be repeated, arguably,
57:55until one gets into the 1910s.
57:58He was painting what was happening, the reality of that time,
58:02because he had his finger on the pulse.
58:04He managed to achieve something quite phenomenal,
58:07and that's what makes Turner a great artist.
58:09I think he's phenomenally important
58:11for the history of art and the history of Britain.
58:17This, then, is J.M.W. Turner,
58:20Britain's great romantic landscape painter,
58:24who delivered to us a visionary story of the Industrial Revolution,
58:30who painted nature
58:32and at the same time revealed the wonders of science and invention,
58:37who used paint to herald a new world.
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