What Makes JMW Turner A Master Of British Art

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NARRATOR: Joseph Mallord William Turner, born in 1775, was an unlikely candidate to become Britain's greatest painter.

He was awkward, short-tempered, and often difficult to deal with.

He never lost his strong working-class accent.

People attending his lectures had little idea what he was saying.

Turner traveled throughout Britain and Europe.

Often on foot and carrying a paint box, he sketched and painted lyrically beautiful landscapes that changed the face of British art.

When he died in 1851, he was one of the wealthiest and most famous artists in Britain's history.

Throughout his career, he was always well aware of the key to his success.

JMW TURNER: The only secret I've got is damned hard work.

NARRATOR: Turner's life and career began in London.

By 1788 at the age of 14, JMW Turner was apprenticed to an architect as a draftsman.

Architectural views appeared in his works throughout his life.

The next year, Turner entered the Royal Academy of Art school at Somerset House.

Its president, the painter Joshua Reynolds, endorsed the prevailing view that ranked paintings in a clearly defined hierarchy.

History painting was considered the noblest, because it could portray events drawn from historical incidents, literature, the Bible, and mythology.

Genre painting, scenes from daily life, came next because they also offered examples of virtue to inspire the viewer.

Then came the more lowly categories of portraiture, landscape, and still life, which were disdained as mere transcriptions of the natural world.

Throughout his career, Turner struggled to elevate landscape painting and demonstrate that it could equal history painting in complexity and expressive power.

In 1791, Turner began a routine he continued for 40 years.

After the Royal Academy's annual exhibitions, held in the early summer, he traveled in search of subjects.

The Wye Valley was a favorite destination.

Tintern Abbey's romantic associations were impeccable, a remnant of England's medieval splendor, its nearby woods and hillsides celebrated in poetry by William Wordsworth.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: Once again do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs that on a wild, secluded scene impress thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky.

NARRATOR: Turner adopted the picturesque approach but focused on the abbey itself.

His precocious virtuosity as a watercolorist was beginning to emerge.

By the mid-1790s, Turner had taken up oil painting.

He learned by looking at 17th-century Dutch marine paintings, and especially the idealized landscapes by two French artists who worked in Italy-- Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorraine.

Turner followed Claude's example buy ennobling landscapes with historical or mythological figures.

He made frequent visits to Wales.

As he moved further into the mountains, he found subjects that were central to one of the most powerful elements of late 18th-century aesthetic thought-- the sublime.

The idea of the sublime, embodied by the overpowering majesty of nature's grandeur, was an idea popularized by the philosopher Edmund Burke.

For Burke, contemplating that grandeur, either directly or in paintings, overwhelmed viewers with feelings of fear, awe, and exultation.

It also had a moral element, emphasizing man's insignificance and humility in the face of the terrifying forces of nature.

Turner's interest in the sublime led him to travel to Switzerland in search of wild landscapes that were thrillingly vast and remote.

He turned Edmund Burke's vision in any direction he chose.

He imbued biblical subjects, like the fifth plague of Egypt, with the awesome power of nature's destructive forces.

The swirling mists of the Alpine blizzard that the Carthaginian general Hannibal and his army encountered while crossing into Italy merged the sublime with the vaunted genre of history painting.

Turner lived through one of the most patriotic periods in British history.

The French Revolution descended into violence.

Louis the XVI's execution in 1793 shocked and appalled the British.

The imperial ambitions of Napoleon that followed the failure to establish a republic kept Britain at war with France and its allies for 22 years.

Napoleon led the French armies across Europe in victory after victory, heightening the British fear of invasion.

That fear lessened in 1805, when the British Navy, under Admiral Horatio Nelson, destroyed the combined French and Spanish fleet at Trafalgar, off the coast of Spain.

That triumph was marred by Nelson's death from a sniper's bullet.

Turner painted a highly original recreation of the decisive moment that claimed Lord Nelson's life, setting it amid the crushing congestion of towering masts, torn sails, and the fog of cannon-fire at precariously close quarters.

The Napoleonic war ended in 1815 at Waterloo.

The Duke of Wellington had called the battle "a damned close-run thing."

close-run thing." The fragility of civilization intrigued Turner throughout his career.

The decline of the Carthaginian Empire depicts the crushing penalty Rome inflicted on the Carthaginians.

The architecture is elegant, but the messy dockside suggests the end of a defeated imperial power.

The women of Carthage are bidding farewell to their men as they sail towards Rome, human spoils of war bound for slavery or death.

With Europe at peace, Turner was free to travel abroad, sketching what he saw in notebooks and taking them back to London to use as a basis for his paintings.

In 1819, he finally reached Italy, the goal of artists throughout Europe eager to learn from its history and beauty.

It was Turner's long-held dream to visit the country he knew from Claude's paintings.

He depicted an idealized Italian landscape and called it Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, after Lord Byron's poem.

In an attempt to lift the painting to the intellectual stature enjoyed by the Romantic poets, Turner included a fragment of Byron's verse in the exhibition catalog.

LORD BYRON: And now fair Italy, thou art the garden of the world.

Even in thy desert, what is like to thee?

Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy waste more rich than other climes' fertility, thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin graced with an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced.

NARRATOR: At Petworth House in Sussex, Lord Egremont, a curious mixture of rake and intellectual, opened his collection of sculpture and paintings to visiting artists, who could come and go as they pleased.

He provided Turner with a studio.

Lord Egremont commissioned several paintings from Turner, including Petworth Lake.

A study for a larger painting, it reveals how Turner's use of oils gained from the experimental work he was undertaking in watercolors during the 1820s.

Turner planned images by laying down broad areas of primary color to denote forms he sought to represent.

[MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: The burning of the Houses of Parliament in 1854 gave Turner one of his great subjects.

The destruction of a national symbol of unity, and the horrors and agonies that accompanied it, was the stuff of tabloids.

Turner made it the stuff of drama.

Sequences of watercolors show he viewed the catastrophe from a variety of locations.

Liquid splotches of red, grey, and blue fight dramatically with each other.

This contest between hot and cold colors would explode violently in the oil paintings he exhibited.

His 1835 version is viewed from the south bank of the Thames, amid an immense crowd of spectators who have gathered to watch their seat of government consumed by a wall of flames.

Throughout the 1830s and into the 1840s, Turner produced works with expressive brushwork and an indistinctness that baffled critics.

Turner continued to travel compulsively until the late 1840s, when his health no longer allowed it.

A series of watercolors came out of a trip to Switzerland in 1841 that represent his supreme achievement in the medium that launched his career.

They're marked by explosions of color and a poetic haziness that obscures topographical detail.

The abstract beauty of Turner's late canvases that dissolve into light are especially apparent in some of his unfinished paintings, like Norham Castle, Sunrise.

Returning to a subject he had painted years earlier, he advanced his composition to a point at which the subject is barely apparent.

Its unfinished state shows how he could stretch the poetic possibilities of color and technique to the threshold of abstraction.

Turner died at his home in Chelsea in December of 1851.

He lay in state in his central London gallery and was buried, at his request, beside the grave of Joshua Reynolds in St. Paul's

Cathedral.

He left a fortune equivalent to $8 million to friends, relatives, and charities, leaving many of his paintings to the nation.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

hello.