Simon Schama's Power of Art (2006–…): Season 1, Episode 5 - Turner - full transcript

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.