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0:00 [Music] if Joseph Mallord William Turner is famous for just one thing it's this his sunsets when I was a student and you know growing up in Margate you were aware of Turner there was the blue plaques and everything and you were told that the fact as his famous Victorian artist that came to Margate because the beautiful sunsets Turner stands above every other British landscape painter his name conjures up images of dramatic skies daunting crags and wild seas but there's another side to Turner [Music] Machines technology industry the
0:48 opposite of nature Turner was much more than a painter of lyrical landscapes he embraced the wonders of science and progress in the years between his birth in 1775 and his death in 1851 Britain experienced the most tumultuous upheaval in its history the Industrial Revolution essentially Turner was born in the age of sail and he died in the age of steam a new age was being created fueled by science and invention science house which could almost be called creative the chemist Humphry Davy discovered new elements Michael Faraday
1:35 harnessed the power of electricity the connection being now made the copper wire immediately begins to revolve around the pole of the magnet Charles Babbage unveiled plans for the world's first computer a machine capable of computing any table with the aid of differences it's about finding out about the stuff of life that feeds into technological change you know new engines new techniques canals tunnels steam ships factories developed it's an enormous span where science and technology and industry all go together Turner was at the heart of these momentous events he painted the Industrial Revolution as it unfolded and
2:22 in the process created a whole new kind of art he wanted sort of instinctively see if belching smoke and a cantering train would generate that kind of beauty he is telling his audience that it's here oh my goodness is rushing up at you a new world was being forged and Turner more than any other painter captured what it felt like to be there [Music] London 1807 gas lamps light up pal mal for the first time Britain is in the
3:11 middle of a scientific revolution the phenomenon of combustion the solution of different substances in water the agencies are fired at the Royal Institution Humphrey Davy is the star of the show the production of rain hail and snow Humphrey Davy is extraordinary he heard huge crowds in fact Albemarle Street became the first one-way street in London because the traffic was so dense when people went to his lectures for the first time we see potassium kind of wonderfully flaring through the crustle sodium bursting into flames on water barium calcium strontium all new
3:59 elements said the people that come along don't just come for the show they come to go away thinking that they are at the forefront of knowledge this is the world in which Turner finds himself as a young painter at the beginning of the 19th century he's fascinated by the visual manifestation of scientific discovery these ideas were bubbling up around him people met they talked with the same aim in view which was understanding and discovering what goes on around us these ideas began to fire him up [Music]
4:55 the fighting Temeraire the nation's favorite painting Turner painted it towards the end of his life when he was 64 and it captures on canvas the extraordinary journey the world had taken over the course of his lifetime so the painting is of the temeraire being towed from Sheerness to rather high that's on its last ever voyage it's this great Leviathan of the age of sail being towed up the Thames into the heart of London by a steam tug the moon is rising on one side of the ship and on the far side of the steamer we have the sung and a big explosion of fiery red for the
5:43 Victorian public who first saw this painting the temeraire was a ship that had symbolized the best and worst of Nelson's Navy she had been one of the bravest battleships in the British fleet with a story that began in 1802 not in glory but in disgrace a lot of the English sailors aboard her they'd been fighting basically for nine years and they just wanted to go home and they weren't allowed to they thought it was their right but in fact it wasn't the mutineers were flogged and the leaders of the mutiny they were all hanged from infamous beginnings the temeraire went on to become a national treasure
6:28 because of this Trafalgar the British attacked in two columns that Mrs L just behind Nelson Nelson his ship the victory was immediately attacked it was at this moment that Nelson was shot captain of the temeraire he saw the victory in trouble and piled straight aid so it was unmistakably heroic what they did putting themselves right in the heat of the action [Music] after the peace with France was declared ships like that came to the end of their useful life until finally the Admiralty
7:14 decided there was no further use for it and it needed to be broken up so what you're looking at is a tugboat owned by the ship breaker beat stone pulling the temeraire upriver towards its final destination rather hide what Turner's got there is this sort of sense of a ghost of you know a veteran ghost or something grand and epic in British life so it's coming to its last moment but it's been pulled there by this tough little iron tugboat the temeraire when she came from Sheerness up to roller highs was a very
8:00 sad Hulk she had no masts at all she was literally falling apart but what Turner does is he paints her almost like she appeared in her glory days he's deliberately doing that to make such a visible important contrast between this steam tug that's pulling her along and the great sailing warships as they would have appeared in their pomp I see it also as a combination of noise and silence that you feel the thrashing of the wheels going round in the water and the sound of the engine the smoke coming out of the funnel indicating all that kind of clanking industrial bustle you associate with the new technology and behind it you just hear the ripple of
8:47 this other ship being towed silently to its doom many people when it was exhibited saw it as a sort of elegy for the passing of the age of sail and its replacement by the new technology of steam this is the time when the top guns of Victorian polemic are saying that we are damned if we become prisoners of the Machine age our Christianity is at peril our national character as at peril we can no longer be moral to each other Turner didn't feel like that at all and the Victorian public didn't want to feel like that at all I don't think it is sad it seems to me
9:35 to be a familial picture as if this young tubby steam tub is the new generation which is guiding some Miss Havisham like ghosts of the past he called painting my old darling so he knew somehow this was the one that made people happy because it did actually make them feel good about the fact they weren't just relying and leaning on wonderful memories of faded glory the faded glory was being pulled on by an equally tough glorious solid black energized future [Music]
10:22 steamships our internal a symbol of the modern world Turner really embraced the idea of steam I think that's incontrovertible while there are very many wrecked sailing ships in Turner there are no wrecked steam ships steam ships are everywhere [Music] Turner's sketchbooks are really quite extraordinary he kept them all his life he often kept several of them in his pocket at the same time and this is a steamer just off a harbor and quite
11:08 typically Turner's added a couple of little color notes for himself just to remind himself of the effect so where the smoke is is fading away if he marks G for gray and of course it's not a composition it's just it's just a very quick record of something seen and these sketchbooks are full of little memoranda like that Turner was absolutely a chronicler of his times he was interested in everything that was going on around him and of course this was what made him such a wonderful portrayal of the Britain of his day in the 1820s international steam travel arrived and Turner was one of the first to record it
11:55 in Dover a steamer chugs merrily out to sea while oarsmen puffin pant in the foreground steamboats were soon a regular sight around the coast of Britain it must be a great relief to get on modern steamer instead of the old even hoist that used to make everybody horrendously seasick and took hours and hours to get there it would have been very exciting thing [Music] but the world into which Turner was born couldn't have been more different he came from another era 18th century Georgian England turn was born in 1775
12:41 the same year as Jane Austen his father was a barber and wig maker who practices trade in Covent Garden as an area where because of theater beginnings what preneur that world society is coming and good society and dodgy society Turner's dad was very ambitious for him he was very keen that Turner should make money he said that his father never praised him for anything other than saving a pay plate which seems to have left its mark on turns character because he became somewhat notoriously mean with money throughout his life it was obvious from quite early on that Turner was very gifted
13:26 [Music] the good thing about his father having a barbers business was that lots of different sorts of people would come in there to have their hair trimmed or their faces shave and we know that some of the people who came in got see Turner's work one person who's known to have frequented the barber shop was Thomas Stoddard and Thomas Tata was actually a member of the Royal Academy he was a painter and Turner's father once remarked to Stata the Royal Academy ssin my son is going to be a painter and he did he joined the Royal Academy schools at the age of 14 [Music]
14:15 Joshua Reynolds the first president Royal Academy was in charge and Turner absolutely revered Reynolds at the Greek head do all Arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feelings the imitation of nature frequently does this sometimes fails and something else succeeds you know he was scholarship boy got into the world economy school he's sort of upwardly mobile through his wits and you could at that time be such a person and then he's on his way the Academy in those days wasn't what we think of an art school being now you weren't taught paint at all it was a drawing school and on your
15:02 own in a way I wish you'd be persuaded that success in your art it depends almost entirely on your own industry and that industry I personally recommend is what the industry of the hands but of the mind he taught himself to paint in oils and at the age of 21 in 1796 he exhibited his first oil painting at the Royal Academy and it was called fishermen at sea it was an absolutely virtuoso piece of painting it was almost as if he'd waited till he completely mastered oil
15:47 painting and then demonstrated exactly what he could do you know I mean if we won't think of an artist like Constable he had to battle for years to get taken seriously and was really an incredibly slow burner compared to Turner who came roaring onto the scene and then continued to occupy the center ground for the rest of his life I think by the time he painted a self-portrait he probably felt he really had arrived and it's very flattering self-portrait I mean Turner didn't like his own appearance he was quite short right rough in his manners strong cockney accent which he never got rid of never wanted to get rid of it he was very pushy very self assertive very ambitious
16:36 but he had the talent to go with it I'm he recommend and a committed obedient to the Wars of art as established about the great masters Reynolds appointed to turn of towards certain painters who he regarded were models of great painters but the practice of the Frenchman Lauda ring is to be adopted he would recommend the 17th century French painters Claude in particular a Claude was regarded as the absolute master of light in landscape Claude painted classical scenes of gods and nymphs frolicking in nature
17:21 ironically would be Claude a painter of a mythical past who would inspire Turner to paint the Industrial Britain of the 19th century Turner certainly loved Claude's paintings and there's a famous story of him as a young man going to a collector's house and seeing pensions for all and bursting into tears he said I shall never paint like that but of course it's time went by he did paint like that he started to think about how he could apply the lessons of Klaus art to something appropriate to his own age [Music]
18:06 this is Turner's version of a Claude young women bathe in a pastoral setting it looks in every way like her Claude except this is not the mythical past it's Devon in 1815 and the Industrial Revolution is about to transform the landscape if you look very very carefully you'll see an enormous waterwheel and this is the wheel phone gun is Lake old mine which was the biggest copper mine in the world at the time so he paints this picture of the most Claudine scene you can find in England as though he were a modern Claude but unlike Lord he includes in the middle of it a scene of modern industries
18:52 [Music] ten years later and Turner's hint of an industrial Britain becomes an onslaught a Claudian seaport transformed into the fires and furnaces of modern Britain it's the most resolutely industrial scene of coal being loaded onboard a ship to be taken from Northumbrian coal fields for the rest of Britain this is a moonlight scene but this is modern industry on the Tyne industry never stops is a 24-hour productive effort and this
19:37 is about industrial might these are the reasons that the England that Turner lives in has become that very place it's because industry is a transforming factor in the world and his picture is a response to that I think Turner was very excited by this kind of progress and also its potential for him as an artist to make pictures keel men is a modern British equivalent of a classical Claud seaport it's a tradition brought up to date occludes seaport paintings were very distinctive
20:23 because you're invariably looking to the source of light which was the Sun and you had parallel lines going off towards a vanishing point and that was the way they were structured and this structure that he uses for this very very modern subject is essentially a Claudian structure if you wanted to renovate the Claudian tradition you're saying effectively that claude understood something about landscape this is how to compose how to deal with light but the Brittain of the middle of the 19th century is no longer peopled with nymphs and gods it's peopled with industry and the people who work in it but this momentous
21:14 scene could never have existed without one pursuit that had dominated the Age science [Music] somerset house in london was home not just to the royal academy for artists but also the royal society for scientists in the early 1800s there was no great divide between art and science like there is today they shared the same building the intellectual world was much smaller meet at the same party as you discussed the same idea as you'd go to the same salons there wasn't this separation of cultures between the Arts and Sciences so that you know on one side of the wall the might be painters
22:00 having a dinner and then you know two rooms down the corridor there might be a scientific lecture going on we have reason to look upon the Sun as a most magnificent opaque globe possessed of an atmosphere in which luminous Klauss ever be in April 1801 just as Turner was hanging his next big seascape on the other side of the wall at the Royal Society legendary astronomer William Herschel was giving a lecture which on the Sun loans in order to obtain as intimate and knowledge of the Sun it is obvious that the first step must be to become well acquainted with all the phenomena that appear on its surface openings flats ridges not yours
22:49 Cranky's shallows dimples and punctures Herschel's lecture on the Sun was published immediately and it was at this point that Turner also began to look at the Sun in a new way even here in this most Claudian of landscapes is evidence of the latest scientific thinking young women danced around celebrating a new harvest it looks like another Claude except for one thing the Sun there are many many many examples in Turner throughout his life of new science triggering ideas in a sense Hershel allows the way Turner paints the Sun in
23:37 the makkal without Herschel's observations Turner might not have really thought about it that was the trigger if you look closely at the picture it does seem to have incorporated ideas that were announced the way the paint is actually applied the sort of region it seems to be taking her shells discovery and manifesting it in paint whereas Turner's great hero Claude would paint the Sun as a yellow disc a in the sky Turner paints the slashes of little little sharp lines Turner is noted throughout his career from making the Sun a very physical object of using
24:23 impasto which is thick paint that sticks up if you look at the other at a canvas sideways it would stick up like a boss of a shield to bring the Sun as a physical object very much closer to the spectators attention for the first time in painting I think we can say he sees the Sun as a real object but something that you simply cannot look at without damaging your eyes we are being blinded by that Sun when I was a boy I used to lie for hours on my back watching the skies and then go home and paint them and there was a stall in Soho Bazaar where they sold
25:09 drawing materials and they used to buy my skies I gave me one [ __ ] sixpence for the small ones and free [ __ ] in sixpence for the larger ones as many a young lady who's got my sky for our drawing turn a sketchbook from 1804 contains a record of the stages of an eclipse but it's not just the heavens that were being analyzed Turner was absorbing developments in the understanding of the weather in December 1802 a young Quaker called Luke Howard gave a lecture to a small group of scientists in London it would become a landmark moment in the creation of modern meteorology
25:55 my talk this evening is concerned with what may strike some as an uncharacteristically impractical subject he decided to give his talk on the subject which he preoccupied him for many years and he had no idea that this lecture to an amateur science club was going to make him famous it is concerned with the modification of clouds if clouds were merely the result of the condensation of vapor in the atmosphere then indeed might the study of them be deemed a useless pursuit of shadows but the case is not so with clouds how it made the simple but penetrating observation because there are many
26:40 shapes and varieties of cloud but only three basic forms which he called cirrus cumulus struts before that time people thought that each player was somehow unique and on its own and what Howard did was give a basic grounding to the science of meteorology Turner would have known of how its classification because everybody did and it was used in artist manuals already by the 1818 tens and twenties [Music] hereafter I shall estimate the force of the wind according to the following scale naught com1 faint breeze or just
27:31 not a calm to light air her son was being mad like to breathe the clouds classified and in 1806 a ship's captain called Francis Beaufort Therese measured the win7 gentle steady gale he came up with a fantastically simple idea instead of simply having a list of wind strengths from one light breeze to twelve hurricane why not measure the effects that those winds have on the sails of a ship that was a brilliant insight it used a visual sign for creating a new way of understanding weather in Beaufort scale it's been amended a little bit but essentially it's still with us Southwest
28:19 5 to 7 becoming cyclonic gale 8 or severe Gale 9 occasionally stormed 10 in Portland and Plymouth well you can't look at her painting by Turner and say well that was a showery day in 1831 but what you can look at Turner's paintings and see is a fascination with the weather which is what everybody was feeling it at that time the root of that feeling is what philosophers called the sublime an obsession with the powerful forces of nature it was the big idea for Turner and other romantic painters in the early 1800s the sublime was a category of art
29:06 which represented nature at its most terrifying and intimidating Turner was fascinated with those aspects of nature that showed how fragile human life was and this was a common romantic theme [Music] the idea that we humans are in awe of what the natural world can do their volcanoes and hurricanes and floods and vast expanses all of that a category was defined in 1757 by a philosopher Edmund Burke and Edmund Burke set out to explain why it was that we should be fascinated by things in pictures
29:54 that would terrify us if we encountered them in real life [Music] it's about being excited by high mountains by a sense of scale and mystery in the world around us and being taken to a point where you are almost on the brink perhaps of being destroyed certainly on the edge of being terrified the sublime the terrible is also beautiful a Turner unlike any other painter would take the idea of the sublime and recast it for the industrial age this is his bell rock lighthouse the
30:45 sea is wild and dangerous it's everything a picture of the sublime should be except for one thing the lighthouse man is not submitting to the power of nature he's challenging it with technology the lighthouse was built between 1807 and 1811 by the Scottish engineer Robert Stevenson who commissioned Turner to paint it well this is Robert Stevenson's classic account with building the bell rock lighthouse well this is this is a very special one with its water stains and all because this is Robert Stevenson's own copy and the chief item in the book is the frontispiece and for this he approached
31:31 JMW Turner and the bell rocks this great big alum that you can see here that is the rock 11 miles from Arbroath and about the same distance from st. Andrews in 1799 something like 70 ships were wrecked in the vicinity of the bell rock lighthouse most of the boats at that time there were wooden ships you can imagine that the effect of that striking a rock Stevenson wanted to build a lighthouse in an almost impossible situation it was only at low tide you could actually get onto the rock so the rock would totally disappear I water what made Stevenson's lighthouse
32:19 special was not just its location but also its revolutionary shape a curved base calculated precisely to withstand the forces of the sea it's almost unbelievable at that it was successful and everything about this job was innovative when Turner finished his watercolour he sent it to Stevenson to be engraved for the book if you look closely at watercolour the the waves that are breaking on the lighthouse come up and almost grip it like a hand and as a bit of wreckage in the foreground these are indices of just how dangerous this spot actually is that the ship's
33:07 internists picture are not sinking they're surviving the lighthouse is protecting them Tennant understood precisely what these things stood for that built properly they were going to save hundreds and over years thousands of lives here you have something that is a demonstration of human ingenuity in the face of an untamed sea this engineering marvel marks a turning point in Turner's art from now on the sublime would not just be about the power of nature it would also be about humanity's inventive ways of challenging it
33:58 this painting by Turner looks at first glance like a classic shipwreck but again Turner has incorporated new technology in an age-old seen this painting depicts an invention by a man called George William man B and it shows here this puff of air which has fired a shot which is attached to a rope out to a shipwreck and they're going to pull that rope tight and they're going to try and ferry people to shore from the shipwreck it was painted in 1831 the year that man B was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society and Turner always had his eyes on the newspapers man B was front-page news and that I think is why
34:43 Turner's painted it Turner met him through a patron a Yarmouth patron called Dawson Turner who was no relation but you know I mean Turner obviously admired this man admired his work it's one of those paintings in which human ingenuity triumphs over the power of the sea mamby was a baroque master at Yarmouth and Yarmouth it was renowned for being a very very dangerous coast and in 1807 we know that man be witness to ship the Snipe going aground on this sandbar and he was horrified by it he can hear the cries of the shipwrecked sailors and the next day he came down to the beach
35:30 there were 144 corpses have been washed up no one could do anything to save those people and mamby decided he was the man to solve this problem a rope so as to communicate in such circumstances with a ship and a portable water the better to ensure a prompt and effectual communication at a period when each successive incident was big with the fate of an entire ship's company and this is a brilliant kind of stuff that Turner loved everyone was talking about mamby and his rather crazy invention the entire coast of Great Britain I hope
36:17 will be guarded with this additional belt of succor and I am NOT without the exhilarating hope of living to that day when my project shall be hailed as the seaman's best friend [Music] lots of people were saved by his device though one wonders exactly what terrors people had to go through between the ship and the shore if you think about the sublime and in this case you know raging winds tempestuous seas here you have a device that can't overcome them that can give us a fighting chance among em Terra's embrace of new technology was
37:06 not just there in the subject of his paintings it was in the very paint itself he discussed pigment recipes with the scientist Michael Faraday new fiery reds and chrome yellows the colors of Industry he was also interested in the geometric rules of art since 1811 he'd been giving a series of lectures at the Royal Academy on perspective he gave the audience great deal of pleasure by providing beautiful diagram showing perspective in action it's often being advanced that the study of perspective is a drudgery and a toil while the observation of nature is pleasant all them which must be a bit but we we have
37:52 not always so happily places to be able to consult the problem for Turner was that despite his pugnacious self-confidence when it came to performing in public he was a disaster to these rules perspective lies an undivided claim the trouble was he wasn't a very good speaker the lectures really exposed his cockney accent it often happens that the prevent the completion of great great concerns and therefore I must wave saying I'm ready and this was thought to be not quite the thing it was thought to reflect a bit badly on the Academy in per to you in fact was that your genius travel was on without a guide that too often finds itself in doubt about there is an embarrassment in his manner approaching
38:37 the most and in eligibility and a vulgarity of pronunciation astonishing in an artist of his rank and respectability next illustration place mathematics he perpetually called mathematics and so on certainly we wouldn't have taken it very kindly if his friends had given him any advice so really he just blundered on Joshua left to future our a volume rich and his audience began to drift away but one person who remained there was Turner's father but it is the lot of all to follow him one is a humble one Turner's father was his closest ally he
39:24 was his guide and his companion his mother though was a different story she was a family secret there's some evidence from relatively early in Turner's life that his mother was accused of having quote a nun governor bull temper his mama's going crazy she's really loose cannon of many times so were led to believe an Turner has to incarcerate her he has to affect release tension her Turner's mother was committed to bedlam hospital whether she was clinically insane we simply don't
40:11 know what we do know however and this is I think a stain on Turner's reputation and his father's for that matter is that they could have elected a more humane private treatment for her and they didn't [Music] the very year his mother was incarcerated Turner left home and moved to Harley Street home to rich connoisseurs and patrons she died in 1804 in bedlam this was not something I think that Turner was very keen for people to know as he was moving up the ladder in his
40:57 profession this was a very small and poignant profile drawing of a woman in a mob cap in an early sketch book she's off guard she's musing she's looking down I think that might well be her you know with the mother gone dad comes to live with Turner you know he mixes his paints for him so it is the kind of you know me and my old dad kind of cockney thing Turner never married and so his father as time went on gave up the shop and became the person who looked after
41:44 Turner as a personality Turner was quite complex very complex his relationship with women was not at all conventional he had a liaison with the widow of a musician called Sarah Danby and she bore him two daughters but he doesn't seem to have been a particularly doting parent they were maintained at a separate residence as far as his character was concerned it really depended who you talked to when the French Romantic painter dellacroix met Turner in 1832 he described him as uncouth like an English farmer he said with a hard cold demeanor
42:32 constable who admired Turner's art didn't like him either that Turner was never going to fit in with his fellow romantics either as a person or as an artist [Music] this is his picture of a factory in the West Midlands for the Romantics factories with a dark side of progress but for Turner they were a source of inspiration he coaxes the most exquisite beautiful pictorial effect out of the blast furnaces of industrial Dudley those people who visited Dudley especially literary commentators were often appalled by what they saw
43:18 Dickens was horrified by the Black Country and the effects of industrialization but what Turner is representing and not what Blake described as the dark satanic Mills it is an image which certainly doesn't criticize the Industrial Revolution in any way when Turner Payne's industry he does painted in a non-judgmental way yes and I don't think that kind of romantic nostalgia that we perhaps tend to get rather obsessed with nowadays really occurred to Turner at all if you went into the valleys and you went into the industrial cities there it was there was industry this was now this was progress this was the modern world
44:04 the modern world in 1842 looked like this a steamboat in a vortex of rain and snow and Turner is doing something extraordinary his painting has become loose less figurative more Atmospheric less solid it's perhaps one of the most extreme pictures he ever showed you cannot tell where the sea ends and the and the air begins it has no side no middle nothing to hold on to there is any solid thing is this little steamboat but this isn't just a boat in a storm there are other forces at work in this
44:50 painting there's an order in the chaos an order which has everything to do with the scientific discoveries that were changing our understanding of nature it all begins with a scientist Michael Faraday in 1821 he demonstrated the theory of magnetic rotation with the world's first electric motor the connection being now made from the plates to a copper wire and to the mercury below the copper wire immediately begins to revolve around the pole of the magnet a decade later Faraday showed that an electric current could be generated through exposure to a magnetic field the relation which holds between the fixed magnetic pole the
45:35 moving wire or metal and the direction of the current evolved at the same time Turner and Faraday's friend the mathematician Mary Somerville was introducing the idea electromagnetism to a wider public in a best-selling book dr. Farraday observes that such as the facility with which electricity is evolved by the Earth's magnetism that scarcely any piece of metal can be moved in contact with others telling you Mary Somerville very well indeed they were good friends Mary Summerville talked many times of going to Turner's studio and always being welcomed even a ship passing over the surface of the water in northern or southern latitudes or to
46:22 have electric currents running directly across the line of her motion curious electromagnetic combinations probably exist which have never yet been noticed what is Turner doing in snowstorm is he describing just the kind of things Somerville and Faraday were talking about is this the visual manifestation of the invisible magnetic forces in nature the key point for snowstorm in my view is the visual parallel that it creates between the sea as a vast uncontrollable force and the invisible powers of the Earth's magnetism
47:09 [Music] underneath the chaos there's a real regularity the waves have a sort of a hairy quality that gets very near the effect of putting iron filings in a magnetic field with a bar magnet how they gather around the bar magnet I think there's a direct connection magnetism was in the air Michael Faraday was working on it Tana and Faraday had conversations their mutual friend Mary Somerville was beginning to write about that these and other scientific topics are making them much more publicly accessible all these things go together
47:55 and suddenly snowstorm [Music] it's the idea of the ship as the focus of all this massive energy this isn't a scientific diagram the town is not trying to explain the Earth's magnetism but he's trying to express what this power is we are looking at a visual metaphor Turner had found a new way of painting he created a visual language to express nature's hidden forces whatever he's understood about magnetism and about science the key thing he's taken
48:41 from it is an understanding of flux and of dynamism and if you stand in front of the snowstorm and look at that tilted horizon and look at that vortex you realize that you yourself have been caught up in that same rhythm by 1840 Turner now in his 60s was making regular trips to Margate a seaside town on the Kent coast he'd been visiting Margate since his childhood now it was a second home d-bots Margate is is Margate it's very pretty and it has really strange light and Mason sunsets and it's very it's got a little fecundity in yeah
49:28 in the atmosphere is this something sexy about it and I think artists and people pick up on that in Margate Turner settled in with a new mistress mrs. booth this may be a picture of her it's part of a stash of erotic drawings by Turner found after his death of course when he became close to mrs. booth his landlady in Margate he used to call himself Hampton who's and to pretend to be a retired naval man there a story is late in life when he was getting more and more inclusive if he took a cab he would get it to drop him off several streets away so that people wouldn't discover his real identity Turner loved to cultivate this air of
50:14 mystery few people were allowed to see him at work but one artist who did was Edward ripping Gil who witnessed Turner putting the final touches to one of his paintings in one part of mysterious proceedings Turner who worked almost entirely with his palette knife was observed to be rolling and spreading a lump of half-transparent stuff over his picture presently the work was finished Turner gathered his tools together and then with his face still to the wall when sliding off all it was for these witnesses was a master magician doing something that they couldn't comprehend
51:01 okay you want to see how it's done here's how it's done [Applause] this is how it was done in 1844 one of Turner's last great oil paintings a train hurtling out of the canvas into the future it's all there in this one extraordinary picture the scientific discoveries the engineering breakthroughs the industrial upheavals come together in Turner's vision of the new britain it's about atmosphere a train crossing a bridge puffing out smoke and soot on a rather wet mr. Tudor in the Thames Valley just the title
51:47 reign stainless speed yeah everything pour in you know it's kind of like it's exciting it's hitting the same note as temeraire so you have the kind of the world of old motion drifting along in that little boat well it's different isn't this sort of coming along the firebox has almost eat me through the casing of the engine chassis as it roars towards you this is the Great Western Railway this is Brunel's fantastic engineering achievement it's the jewel in the crown of the railway system the railway bridge over which the train is going is
52:33 isambard kingdom brunel x' so it is a homage to one of the defining figures of Victorian Britain where this picture is painted we're just about a decade and a half into the history of the railways I mean remember before the railways arrived nobody had gone faster than a horse could gallop and now we have these railways that even by 1844 when this picture is danna going 3040 miles an hour and they're soon to go 5060 miles an hour unheard of speeds it really is transformational the Great Western was even responsible for standardizing time there was a time difference between Tay
53:18 Exeter and London about 15 20 minutes because it was set by the rising of the Sun and it was thanks to the Great Western that we have Greenwich Mean Time and if you look very closely there is a hair that's running four hits life in front of the train I mean hair is in Britain anyway the fastest natural animal so you've got this contrast between the modern industrial speedy machine and the natural speedy animal the training rain steam and speed is not
54:06 just a train rushing at us but it's also a reminder of the modern world and how the modern world is changing the landscape changing society changing individual lives the coming of the railway is the destruction of many many homes of ordinary people especially building the stations in London and at all the cities driving through Old England the people that most resented it are by now the sort of aging romantics like Wordsworth and Ruskin who feared that these hordes would invade their Beautif landscapes but Turner's painting is a great cheer for Brunel I think when the novelist and art critic William Thackeray first saw rain steam and speed
54:52 he knew he was looking at something completely new in painting the rain in the astounding picture is composed of dabs of dirty putty slapped onto the canvas with a trowel the sunshine scintillates out a very thick smeary lumps of chrome yellow the world has never seen anything like this picture he's using paint to make us feel what it was like to be there I mean Thackery commented on the fact when you got up close to the picture you really couldn't get away from the thickness of the paint we shouldn't say that only Impressionism and the modern
55:37 movement had these revelations I think what makes Turner extraordinary is that he came upon these understandings in the 19th century you look at most a Victorian painting that around this time including mates of his like Wilkie who he laughed I mean it's pathetically rudimentary and laborious and literal the notion that you as a fellow you know of the Royal Academy would make this kind of maelstrom of paint and deliver it as art you tell me who else is doing that no the answer is no one and it isn't simply nice little curlicues of smoke coming out of a funnel it's somebody who understands how steam power has harnessed heat and turned it into motion
56:23 nobody else had found a way of painting that transformation he wanted sort of instinctively see if belching smoke and a cantering train would generate that kind of beauty what he does is the industrial sublime it's kind of modernization perhaps of the sublime it's making it applicable to a modern age which is making scientific and technological advances and is learning to harness nature you know the sublime usually presupposes the intrusion of something mechanical as the enemy it's not the enemy for Tona
57:09 the most out mysteric of all of Turner's paintings where all the elements come together earth air fire and water becomes a celebration of progress for Turner industry becomes the sublime it's as though those natural forces have been harnessed by mankind for their own betterment the volcanoes and hurricanes that might traditionally be associated with the sublime now occur inside boilers and drive pistons no one had thought like that painted like that imagined it like that and it's not going to be repeated arguably until one gets into the 1910s
57:57 he was painting what was happening in reality at that time because he had his finger on the pulse he managed to achieve something quite phenomenal and that's what makes turning a great artist I think he's phenomenally important for the history of art and the history of Britain this then is JMW Turner Britain's great romantic landscape painter who delivered to us a visionary story of the Industrial Revolution who painted nature and at the same time revealed the wonders of science and invention who used paint to herald a new world
58:44 [Music] an AI player exclusive for you with a private view of Turner from Benjamin Zephaniah available now we're gearing up for Saturday night Swedish crime drama on bbc4 back here at 9:00 after the ships that made the Commonwealth coming up next you
