The Genius of Turner: Painting the Industrial Revolution


The Genius of Turner: Painting the Industrial Revolution

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If Joseph Mallord William Turner is famous for just one thing,

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it's this,

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his sunsets.

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When I was a student and...

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growing up in Margate, you were aware of Turner,

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there was blue plaques and everything.

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And you were told about the fact

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there was this famous Victorian artist

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that came to Margate because of the beautiful sunsets.

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Turner stands above every other British landscape painter.

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His name conjures up images of dramatic skies,

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daunting crags and wild seas.

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But there's another side to Turner.

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Machines, technology, industry.

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The opposite of nature.

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Turner was much more than a painter of lyrical landscapes.

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He embraced the wonders of science and progress.

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In the years between his birth in 1775 and his death in 1851,

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Britain experienced the most tumultuous upheaval in its history,

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the Industrial Revolution.

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Essentially, Turner was born in the age of sail,

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and he died in the age of steam.

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A new was age was being created, fuelled by science and invention.

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Science has bestowed on man

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powers which could almost be called creative.

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The chemist Humphry Davy discovered new elements.

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Michael Faraday harnessed the power of electricity.

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The connection being now made, the copper wire immediately begins

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to revolve around the pole of magnet.

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Charles Babbage unveiled plans for the world's first computer.

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A machine capable of computing any table with the aid of differences.

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It was about finding out about the stuff of life.

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That feeds into technological change.

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You know, new engines, new techniques,

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canals, tunnels, steamships, factories develop.

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It's an enormous span

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where science and technology and industry all go together.

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Turner was at the heart of these momentous events.

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He painted the Industrial Revolution as it unfolded,

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and in the process created a whole new kind of art.

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He wanted to sort of instinctively see

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if belching smoke and a cantering train

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would generate that kind of beauty.

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He is telling his audience that it's here,

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and my goodness, it's rushing up at you.

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A new world was being forged,

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and Turner, more than any other painter,

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captured what it felt like to be there.

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London, 1807.

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Gas lamps light up Pall Mall for the first time.

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Britain is in the middle of a scientific revolution.

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The phenomena of combustion,

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the solution of difference substances in water,

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the agencies of fire!

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APPLAUSE

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At the Royal Institution, Humphry Davy is the star of the show.

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The production... of rain, hail and snow!

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Humphry Davy is extraordinary.

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He had huge crowds.

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In fact, Albemarle Street became the first one-way street in London

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because the traffic was so dense when people went to his lectures.

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For the first time,

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we see potassium kind of wonderfully flaring through the crust,

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or sodium bursting into flames on water.

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Barium, calcium, strontium all new elements.

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So the people that come along don't just come for the show.

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They come to go away thinking they are at the forefront of knowledge.

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This is the world in which Turner finds himself

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as a young painter at the beginning of the 19th century.

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He's fascinated

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by the visual manifestation of scientific...discovery.

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These ideas were bubbling up around him.

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People met, they talked with the same aim in view,

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which was understanding and discovering what goes on around us.

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These ideas began to fire him up.

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The Fighting Temeraire.

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The nation's favourite painting.

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Turner painted it towards the end of his life when he was 64,

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and it captures on canvas the extraordinary journey

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the world had taken over the course of his lifetime.

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So the painting is of the Temeraire

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being towed from Sheerness to Rotherhithe.

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It's on its last ever voyage.

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It's this great leviathan of the age of sail

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being towed up the Thames into the heart of London by a steam tug.

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The moon is rising on one side of the ship,

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and on the far side of the steamer,

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we have the sun in a big explosion of fiery red.

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For the Victorian public who first saw this painting,

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the Temeraire was a ship that had symbolised

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the best and worst of Nelson's navy.

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She'd been one the bravest battleships in the British fleet

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with a story that began in 1802, not in glory but in disgrace.

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A lot of the English sailors aboard her,

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they'd been fighting basically for nine years,

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and they just wanted to go home, and they weren't allowed to.

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They thought it was their right when, in fact, it wasn't.

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The mutineers were flogged,

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and the leaders of the mutiny, they were all hanged.

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From infamous beginnings,

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the Temeraire went on to become a national treasure because of this,

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Trafalgar.

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The British attacked in two columns.

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The Temeraire sailed just behind Nelson.

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Nelson, his ship, the Victory, was immediately attacked.

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It was at this moment that Nelson was shot.

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The captain of the Temeraire,

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he saw the Victory in trouble and piled straight in.

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So it was unmistakably heroic, what they did,

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putting themselves right in the heat of the action.

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After the peace with France was declared,

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ships like that came to the end of their useful life

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until finally the Admiralty decided there was no further use for it

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and it needed to be broken up.

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So what you're looking at is a tug boat

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owned by the ship-breaker Beatson,

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pulling the Temeraire up river

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towards its final destination at Rotherhithe.

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What Turner's got there is this sort of sense of a ghost,

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a veteran ghost of something grand and epic in British life.

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So it's coming to its last moment,

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but it's being pulled there by this tough little iron tug boat.

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The Temeraire when she came from Sheerness up to Rotherhithe

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was a very sad hulk.

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She had no masts at all, she was literally falling apart,

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but what Turner does

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is he paints almost like she appeared in her glory days.

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He's deliberately doing that

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to make such a visible important contrast

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between this steam tug that's pulling her along

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and the great sailing warships

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as they would have appeared in their pomp.

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I see it also as a combination of noise and silence,

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that you feel the thrashing of the wheels going round in the water,

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and the sound of the engines, the smoke coming out of the funnel,

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indicating all that kind of clanking industrial bustle

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you associate with the new technology.

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And behind it you just hear the ripple

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of this other ship being towed silently to its doom.

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Many people, when it was exhibited,

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saw it as a sort of elegy for the passing of the age of sail

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and its replacement by the new technology of steam.

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This is the time when the top guns of Victorian polemic

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are saying that we are damned

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if we become prisoners of the machine age,

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our Christianity is at peril, our national character is at peril,

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we can no longer be moral to each other.

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Turner didn't feel like that at all,

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and the Victorian public didn't want to feel like that at all.

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I don't think it is sad.

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It seems to me to be a familial picture,

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as if this young, tubby steam tug is the new generation,

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which is guiding

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some Miss Havisham-like ghost of the past!

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He called the painting, "my old darling",

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so he knew somehow this was the one that made people happy,

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because it did actually make them feel good

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about the fact they weren't just relying

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and leaning on wonderful memories of faded glory.

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The faded glory was being pulled on

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by an equally tough, glorious, solid, black, energised future.

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Steamships are, in Turner, a symbol of the modern world.

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Turner really embraced the idea of steam.

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I think that's incontrovertible.

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While there are very many wrecked sailing ships in Turner,

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there are no wrecked steamships.

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Steamships are everywhere.

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Turner's sketchbooks are really quite extraordinary.

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He kept them all his life.

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He often kept several of them in his pocket at the same time.

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And this is a steamer, just off a harbour.

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And quite typically,

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Turner has added a couple of little colour notes for himself

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just to remind himself of the effect,

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so where the smoke is fading away,

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he marks G for grey.

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And of course, it's not a composition,

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it's just a very quick record of something seen,

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and these sketchbooks are full of little memoranda like that.

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Turner was absolutely a chronicler of his times.

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He was interested in everything that was going on around him,

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and of course this was what made him

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such a wonderful portrayer of the Britain of his day.

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In the 1820s, international steam travel arrived,

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and Turner was one of the first to record it.

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In Dover, a steamer chugs merrily out to sea

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while oarsmen puff and pant in the foreground.

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Steamboats were soon a regular sight around the coast of Britain.

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It must have been a great relief to get on a modern steamer,

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instead of the old heaving hoys

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that used to make everybody horrendously seasick

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and took hours and hours to get there.

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It would have been a very exciting thing.

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But the world into which Turner was born

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couldn't have been more different.

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He came from another era 18th century Georgian England.

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Turner was born in 1775, the same year as Jane Austen.

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His father was a barber and wig-maker

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who practised his trade in Covent Garden.

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Just tuck you in, sir...

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It's an area where, because of theatre,

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the beginnings of opera and all that world,

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society is coming, and good society and dodgy society.

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Turner's dad was very ambitious for him.

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He was very keen that Turner should make money.

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He said that his father never praised him

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for anything other than saving a ha'penny...

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My own son, sir.

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..which seems to left its mark on Turner's character,

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because he became somewhat notoriously mean with money

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throughout his life.

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It was obvious from quite early on that Turner was very gifted.

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The good thing about his father having a barber's business

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was that lots of different sorts of people would come in there

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to have their hair trimmed or their faces shaved,

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and we know that some of the people who came in got to see Turner's work.

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One person who is known to have frequented the barber's shop

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was Thomas Stothard.

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And Thomas Stothard was actually a member of the Royal Academy.

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He was a painter.

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And Turner's father once remarked

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to Thomas Stothard, the Royal Academician...

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My son is going to be a painter.

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And he did, he joined the Royal Academy Schools at the age of 14.

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Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy, was in charge,

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and Turner absolutely revered Reynolds.

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The great end to all art

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is to make an impression on the imagination and the feelings.

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The imitation of nature frequently does this.

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Sometimes it fails and something else succeeds.

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You know, he was a scholarship boy, got into the Royal Academy School.

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He's sort of upwardly mobile through his wits,

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and you could at that time be such a person.

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And then he's on his way.

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The academy in those days

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wasn't what we think of an art school being now.

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You weren't taught to paint at all, it was a drawing school,

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and you were very much on your own in a way.

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I wish you to be persuaded that success in your art

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depends almost entirely on your own industry,

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and that industry, I principally recommend,

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is not of the industry of the hands

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but of the mind.

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He taught himself to paint in oils,

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and at the age of 21, in 1796,

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he exhibited his first oil painting at the Royal Academy,

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and it was called Fishermen At Sea.

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It was an absolutely virtuoso piece of painting.

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It was almost as if he'd waited

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till he'd completely mastered oil painting

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and then demonstrated exactly what he could do.

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You know, I mean, if one thinks of an artist like Constable,

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he had to battle for years to get taken seriously

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and was an incredibly slow-burner compared to Turner,

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who came roaring onto the scene

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and continued to occupy the centre ground for the rest of his life.

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I think, by the time he painted the self-portrait,

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he probably felt he really had arrived.

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And it's a very flattering self-portrait.

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I mean, Turner didn't like his own appearance.

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He was quite short, quite rough in his manners,

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strong Cockney accent, which he never got rid of,

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never wanted to get rid of it.

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He was very pushy, very self-assertive,

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very ambitious,

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but...he had the talent to go with it.

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I would chiefly recommend an implicit obedience

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to the rules of art as established by the great masters.

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Reynolds pointed Turner towards certain painters

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who he regarded were models of great painting.

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But the practice of the Frenchman Claude Lorrain is to be adopted...

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He would recommend the 17th century French painters,

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Claude in particular.

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Claude was regarded as the absolute master of light in landscape.

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Claude painted classical scenes

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of gods and nymphs frolicking in nature.

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Ironically, it would be Claude, a painter of a mythical past,

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who would inspire Turner

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to paint the industrial Britain of 19th century.

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Turner certainly loved Claude's paintings.

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There's a famous story of him as a young man

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going to a collector's house

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and seeing paintings by Claude and bursting into tears.

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He said...

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I shall never paint like that.

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But of course as time went by, he did paint like that.

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He started to think

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about how he could apply the lessons of Claude's art

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to something appropriate to his own age.

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This is Turner's version of a Claude.

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Young women bathe in pastoral setting.

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It looks in every way like a Claude,

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except this is not the mythical past.

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It's Devon in 1815,

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and the Industrial Revolution is about to transform the landscape.

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If you look very, very carefully, you'll see an enormous water wheel.

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And this is the wheel for Gunnislake Old Mine,

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which was the biggest copper mine in the world at the time.

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So he paints this picture

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of the most Claudian scene he can find in England

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as though he were a modern Claude,

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but, unlike Claude, he includes in the middle of it

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a scene of modern industries.

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Ten years later,

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and Turner's hint of an industrial Britain

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becomes an onslaught.

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A Claudian seaport

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transformed into the fires and furnaces

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of modern Britain.

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It's the most resolutely industrial scene

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of coal being loaded onboard a ship

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to be taken from the Northumbrian coalfields to the rest of Britain.

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This is a moonlight scene,

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but this is modern industry on the Tyne.

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Industry never stops.

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It's a 24-hour productive effort, and this is about industrial might.

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These are the reasons that the England that Turner lives in

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has become that very place.

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It's because industry is a transforming factor in the world,

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and his picture is a response to that.

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I think Turner was very excited by this kind of progress

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and also its potential for him as an artist to make pictures.

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Keelmen is a modern British equivalent

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of a classical Claude seaport.

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It's a tradition bought up-to-date.

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Claude's seaport paintings were very distinctive,

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because you were invariably looking to the source of light,

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which was the sun,

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and you had parallel lines going off towards a vanishing point,

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and that was the way they were structured.

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And the structure that he uses for this very, very modern subject

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is essentially a Claudian structure.

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If you wanted to renovate the Claudian tradition,

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you're saying effectively that Claude understood something about landscape,

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this is how to compose, how to deal with light.

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But the Britain of the middle of the 19th century

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is no longer peopled with nymphs and gods.

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It's peopled with industry and the people who work in it.

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But this momentous scene could never have existed

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without one pursuit that had dominated the age

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science.

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Somerset House in London

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was home not just to the Royal Academy for artists

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but also the Royal Society for scientists.

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In the early 1800s, there was no great divide

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between art and science like there is today.

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They shared the same building.

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The intellectual world was much smaller.

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You'd meet at the same parties,

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you'd discuss the same ideas, you'd go to the same salons.

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There wasn't this separation of cultures

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between the arts and sciences,

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so that on one side of the wall there might be painters having a dinner,

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and then two rooms down the corridor,

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there might be a scientific lecture going on.

0:22:030:22:06

We have reason to look upon the sun

0:22:080:22:10

as a most magnificent opaque globe

0:22:100:22:14

possessed of an atmosphere in which luminous clouds, ever varying...

0:22:140:22:18

In April 1801, just as Turner was hanging his next big seascape,

0:22:180:22:23

on the other side of the wall at the Royal Society,

0:22:230:22:27

legendary astronomer William Herschel

0:22:270:22:29

was giving a lecture on the sun.

0:22:290:22:32

In order to obtain as intimate a knowledge of the sun,

0:22:320:22:36

it is obvious that the first step must be to become well acquainted

0:22:360:22:40

with all the phenomena that appear on its surface.

0:22:400:22:43

Openings, flats,

0:22:440:22:47

ridges, nodules,

0:22:470:22:50

crankles, shallows,

0:22:500:22:53

dimples and punctures.

0:22:530:22:55

Herschel's lecture on the sun was published immediately.

0:22:570:23:01

And it was at this point

0:23:010:23:02

that Turner also began to look at the sun in a new way.

0:23:020:23:05

Even here, in this most Claudian of landscapes,

0:23:060:23:09

is hidden evidence of the latest scientific thinking.

0:23:090:23:12

Young women dance around celebrating a new harvest.

0:23:120:23:16

It looks like another Claude except for one thing the sun.

0:23:160:23:20

There are many, many, many examples in Turner throughout his life

0:23:220:23:26

of new science triggering ideas.

0:23:260:23:30

In a sense, Herschel allows

0:23:320:23:35

the way Turner paints the sun

0:23:350:23:38

in the Macon.

0:23:380:23:40

Without Herschel's observations,

0:23:400:23:42

Turner might not have really... thought about it.

0:23:420:23:45

That was the trigger.

0:23:450:23:48

If you look closely at the picture,

0:23:480:23:49

it does seem to have incorporated ideas that were announced.

0:23:490:23:55

The way the paint is actually applied with a sort of ridge in it

0:23:550:23:59

seems to be taking Herschel's discovery

0:23:590:24:02

and manifesting it in paint.

0:24:020:24:04

Whereas Turner's great hero Claude

0:24:050:24:09

would paint the sun as a yellow disc hanging in the sky,

0:24:090:24:13

Turner paints slashes of...

0:24:130:24:17

little sharp lines.

0:24:170:24:19

Turner is noted throughout his career

0:24:190:24:22

for making the sun a very physical object,

0:24:220:24:24

of using impasto, which is thick paint that sticks up...

0:24:240:24:26

If you look at a canvas sideways,

0:24:260:24:28

it would stick up like a boss of a shield.

0:24:280:24:31

To bring the sun as a physical object

0:24:310:24:34

very much closer to the spectator's attention.

0:24:340:24:37

For the first time in painting, I think we can say,

0:24:410:24:46

he sees the sun as a real object,

0:24:460:24:49

but something you simply cannot look at without damaging your eyes.

0:24:490:24:54

We are being blinded by that sun.

0:24:540:24:57

"When I was a boy, I used to lie for hours on my back watching the skies

0:25:010:25:06

"and then go home and paint them.

0:25:060:25:07

"And there was a stall in Soho bazaar where they sold drawing materials,

0:25:070:25:11

"and they used to buy my skies.

0:25:110:25:14

"They gave me one shilling sixpence for the small ones

0:25:140:25:16

"and three shillings sixpence for the larger ones.

0:25:160:25:19

"There's many a young lady who's got my sky for her drawing."

0:25:190:25:22

Turner's sketchbook from 1804

0:25:260:25:27

contains a record of the stages of an eclipse.

0:25:270:25:31

But it's not just the heavens that were being analysed.

0:25:320:25:35

Turner was absorbing developments in the understanding of the weather.

0:25:350:25:39

In December 1802, a young Quaker called Luke Howard

0:25:410:25:44

gave a lecture to a small group of scientists in London.

0:25:440:25:48

It would become a landmark moment in the creation of modern meteorology.

0:25:480:25:52

My talk this evening is concerned with what may strike some

0:25:560:26:01

as an uncharacteristically impractical subject.

0:26:010:26:04

He decided to give his talk

0:26:040:26:07

on a subject which had preoccupied him for many years,

0:26:070:26:09

and he had no idea that this lecture to an amateur science club

0:26:090:26:13

was going to make him famous.

0:26:130:26:14

It is concerned with the modification of clouds.

0:26:140:26:18

If clouds were merely the result

0:26:190:26:22

of the condensation of vapour in the atmosphere,

0:26:220:26:26

then indeed might the study of them

0:26:260:26:27

be deemed a useless pursuit of shadows.

0:26:270:26:30

But the case is not so with clouds.

0:26:320:26:35

Howard made the simple but penetrating observation

0:26:360:26:40

that there are many shapes and varieties of clouds,

0:26:400:26:43

but only three basic forms, which he called...

0:26:430:26:46

Cirrus.

0:26:460:26:48

Cumulus.

0:26:480:26:50

Stratus.

0:26:500:26:51

Before that time, people thought

0:26:520:26:54

that each cloud was somehow unique and on its own,

0:26:540:26:57

and what Howard did

0:26:570:26:58

was give a basic grounding to the science of meteorology.

0:26:580:27:02

Turner would have known of Howard's cloud classification,

0:27:040:27:07

because everybody did,

0:27:070:27:08

and it was used in artists' manuals already by the 1810s and '20s.

0:27:080:27:14

Hereafter I shall estimate the force of the wind

0:27:210:27:24

according to the following scale.

0:27:240:27:27

Nought calm.

0:27:270:27:30

One faint breeze or just not a calm.

0:27:300:27:34

Two light air...

0:27:340:27:36

The sun was being mapped, the clouds classified,

0:27:360:27:40

and in 1806 a ship's captain called Francis Beaufort measured the wind.

0:27:400:27:46

Seven gentle steady gale.

0:27:460:27:48

He came up with a fantastically simple idea.

0:27:480:27:51

Instead of simply having a list of wind strengths

0:27:510:27:53

from 1, light breeze, to 12, hurricane,

0:27:530:27:57

why not measure the effects that those winds have

0:27:570:28:01

on the sails of a ship?

0:28:010:28:04

That was a brilliant insight.

0:28:040:28:06

It used a visual sign for creating a new way of understanding weather.

0:28:060:28:11

And Beaufort's scale, it's been amended a little bit,

0:28:130:28:16

but essentially it's still with us.

0:28:160:28:19

Southwest five to seven,

0:28:190:28:21

becoming cyclonic gale eight or severe gale nine,

0:28:210:28:26

occasionally storm ten in Portland and Plymouth.

0:28:260:28:29

Well, you can't look at a painting by Turner

0:28:290:28:31

and say, "Well, that was a showery day in 1831."

0:28:310:28:34

But what you can look at Turner's paintings and see

0:28:340:28:37

is a fascination with the weather,

0:28:370:28:38

which is what everybody was feeling at that time.

0:28:380:28:42

The root of that feeling is what philosophers called the Sublime...

0:28:470:28:51

..an obsession with the powerful forces of nature.

0:28:540:28:57

It was the big idea for Turner

0:28:580:29:00

and other Romantic painters in the early 1800s.

0:29:000:29:03

The Sublime was a category of art,

0:29:050:29:08

which represented nature at its most...terrifying and intimidating.

0:29:080:29:13

Turner was fascinated with those aspects of nature

0:29:150:29:20

that showed how fragile human life was,

0:29:200:29:23

and this was a common Romantic theme.

0:29:230:29:25

The idea that we humans are in awe of what the natural world can do,

0:29:300:29:34

the volcanoes and hurricanes and floods and vast expanses,

0:29:340:29:38

all of that.

0:29:380:29:39

The category was defined in 1757 by the philosopher Edmund Burke,

0:29:410:29:47

and Edmund Burke set out to explain why it was that we should be

0:29:470:29:52

fascinated by things in pictures

0:29:520:29:55

that would terrify us if we encountered them in real life.

0:29:550:29:59

It's about being excited by high mountains,

0:30:060:30:09

by a sense of scale and mystery in the world around us,

0:30:090:30:13

and being taken to a point

0:30:130:30:16

where you are almost on the brink, perhaps, of being destroyed.

0:30:160:30:21

Certainly on the edge of being terrified.

0:30:210:30:23

The Sublime, the terrible, is also beautiful.

0:30:250:30:29

But Turner, unlike any other painter,

0:30:320:30:35

would take the idea of the Sublime

0:30:350:30:37

and re-cast it for the industrial age.

0:30:370:30:39

This is his Bell Rock Lighthouse.

0:30:430:30:46

The sea is wild and dangerous.

0:30:460:30:48

It's everything a picture of the Sublime should be,

0:30:480:30:51

except for one thing.

0:30:510:30:52

The lighthouse.

0:30:530:30:54

Man is not submitting to the power of nature.

0:30:560:30:59

He's challenging it with technology.

0:30:590:31:01

The lighthouse was built between 1807 and 1811

0:31:030:31:07

by the Scottish engineer Robert Stevenson,

0:31:070:31:10

who commissioned Turner to paint it.

0:31:100:31:11

This is Robert Stevenson's classic account

0:31:130:31:16

of building the Bell Rock lighthouse.

0:31:160:31:18

This is a very special one with its water stains and all,

0:31:190:31:22

because this is Robert Stevenson's own copy, and the chief item

0:31:220:31:28

in the book is the frontispiece,

0:31:280:31:30

and for this, he approached JMW Turner.

0:31:300:31:33

The Bell Rock's this great big lump here, that is the rock,

0:31:350:31:39

11 miles from Arbroath, and about the same distance from St Andrews.

0:31:390:31:44

In 1799, something like 70 ships were wrecked

0:31:460:31:51

in the vicinity of the Bellrock lighthouse.

0:31:510:31:53

Most of the boats at that time were wooden ships.

0:31:540:31:57

You can imagine the effect of that striking a rock.

0:31:570:32:01

Stevenson wanted to build a lighthouse

0:32:010:32:04

in an almost impossible situation.

0:32:040:32:08

It was only at low tide you could actually get onto the rock,

0:32:080:32:12

so the rock would totally disappear at high water.

0:32:120:32:15

What made Stevenson's lighthouse special was not just its location,

0:32:180:32:23

but also its revolutionary shape -

0:32:230:32:26

a curved base calculated precisely to withstand forces of the sea.

0:32:260:32:31

It's almost unbelievable that it was successful.

0:32:320:32:36

Everything about this job was innovative.

0:32:360:32:39

When Turner finished his watercolour,

0:32:420:32:44

he sent it to Stevenson to be engraved for the book.

0:32:440:32:47

If you look closely at the watercolour,

0:32:490:32:51

the waves that are breaking on the lighthouse come up and almost grip

0:32:510:32:55

it like a hand and there is a bit of wreckage in the foreground.

0:32:550:33:00

These are indices of just how dangerous this spot actually is.

0:33:000:33:06

But the ships in Turner's picture are not sinking.

0:33:080:33:11

They're surviving.

0:33:110:33:14

The lighthouse is protecting them.

0:33:140:33:16

Turner understood precisely what these things stood for -

0:33:180:33:21

that, built properly, they were going to save hundreds,

0:33:210:33:24

and over years, thousands of lives.

0:33:240:33:28

Here you have something that is a demonstration of human ingenuity

0:33:280:33:32

in the face of an untamed sea.

0:33:320:33:35

This engineering marvel marks a turning point in Turner's art.

0:33:390:33:44

From now on, the Sublime would not just be about the power of nature,

0:33:440:33:48

it would also be about humanity's inventive ways of challenging it.

0:33:480:33:51

This painting by Turner looks, at first glance,

0:33:590:34:02

like a classic shipwreck.

0:34:020:34:04

But again, Turner has incorporated new technology in an age-old scene.

0:34:040:34:09

This painting depicts an invention by a man

0:34:120:34:15

called George William Manby, and it shows here this puff of air

0:34:150:34:20

which has fired a shot,

0:34:200:34:23

which is attached to a rope out to a shipwreck,

0:34:230:34:26

and they are going to pull that rope tight,

0:34:260:34:28

and they are going to try to ferry people to shore from the shipwreck.

0:34:280:34:32

It was painted in 1831, the year that Manby was elected

0:34:330:34:36

as a fellow of the Royal Society,

0:34:360:34:38

and Turner always had his eyes on the newspapers.

0:34:380:34:41

Manby was front page news, and that, I think,

0:34:410:34:44

is why Turner's painted it.

0:34:440:34:45

Turner met him though a patron, a Yarmouth patron called Dawson Turner,

0:34:470:34:51

who was no relation, but Turner obviously admired this man,

0:34:510:34:56

admired his work.

0:34:560:34:58

It's one of those painting in which human ingenuity

0:34:580:35:02

triumphs over the power of the sea.

0:35:020:35:04

Manby was a barrack master at Yarmouth,

0:35:070:35:09

and Yarmouth was renowned for being a very, very dangerous coast.

0:35:090:35:14

And in 1807 we know Mandy witnessed a ship, the Snipe,

0:35:140:35:18

going aground on this sandbar.

0:35:180:35:20

And he was horrified by it.

0:35:230:35:24

He could hear cries of these of the shipwrecked sailors.

0:35:240:35:27

And the next day he came down to the beach

0:35:290:35:31

and there were 144 corpses had been washed up.

0:35:310:35:34

No-one could do anything to save those people,

0:35:380:35:41

and Manby decided he was the man to solve this problem.

0:35:410:35:44

A rope, so as to communicate in such circumstances with a ship,

0:35:460:35:51

and a portable motor, the better to ensure a prompt

0:35:510:35:57

and effectual communication at a period when each successive instant

0:35:570:36:01

was big with the fate of an entire ship's company.

0:36:010:36:06

And this is all brilliant stuff that Turner loved.

0:36:060:36:10

Everyone was talking about Manby and his rather crazy invention.

0:36:100:36:13

The entire coast of Great Britain, I hope,

0:36:150:36:18

will be guarded with this additional belt of succour,

0:36:180:36:22

and I am not without the exhilarating hope

0:36:220:36:25

of living to that day when my project

0:36:250:36:29

shall be hailed as the seaman's best friend.

0:36:290:36:33

Lots of people were saved by his device,

0:36:360:36:39

though one wonders exactly what terrors people had to go though

0:36:390:36:43

between the ship and the shore

0:36:430:36:46

If you think about the Sublime, and in this case, you know,

0:36:470:36:50

raging winds, tempestuous seas,

0:36:500:36:53

here you have a device that can't overcome them,

0:36:530:36:56

but can give us a fighting chance among them.

0:36:560:36:59

Turner's embrace of new technology was not just there

0:37:050:37:07

in the subject of his paintings, it was in the very paint itself.

0:37:070:37:11

He discussed pigment recipes with the scientist Michael Faraday.

0:37:120:37:17

New fiery reds and chrome yellows - the colours of industry.

0:37:170:37:22

He was also interested in the geometric rules of art.

0:37:230:37:27

Since 1811, he'd been giving a series of lectures

0:37:270:37:29

at the Royal Academy on Perspective.

0:37:290:37:31

He gave the audience a great deal of pleasure

0:37:320:37:36

by providing beautiful diagrams showing perspective in action.

0:37:360:37:42

It has often been advanced that the study of perspective

0:37:420:37:45

is a drudgery and a toil,

0:37:450:37:48

while the observation of nature is pleasant and all must be abitted,

0:37:480:37:51

but we, erm, we are not always so happily placed

0:37:510:37:54

so as to be able to consult her unerring laws...

0:37:540:37:57

The problem for Turner was that

0:37:570:37:58

despite his pugnacious self-confidence,

0:37:580:38:01

when it came to performing in public, he was a disaster.

0:38:010:38:05

To these rules, the perspective lies an undivided claim.

0:38:050:38:08

The trouble was he wasn't a very good speaker.

0:38:080:38:11

The lectures really exposed his cockney accent.

0:38:110:38:16

It often happens that the prevent the completion of the,

0:38:160:38:20

the great concerns, and therefore I must waive saying...

0:38:200:38:23

And this was thought to be not quite the thing.

0:38:230:38:26

It was thought to reflect a bit badly on the Academy.

0:38:270:38:31

Impetu...impetuosity of genius travels on without a guide.

0:38:310:38:33

It too often finds itself in doubt about...

0:38:330:38:35

'There is an embarrassment in his manner

0:38:350:38:37

'approaching almost unintelligibly and a vulgarity of pronunciation

0:38:370:38:42

'astonishing in an artist of his rank and respectability.'

0:38:420:38:46

Next illustration, please.

0:38:480:38:50

'Mathematics he perpetually called "mithematics", and so on.'

0:38:500:38:55

Certainly he wouldn't have taken it very kindly

0:38:560:38:58

if his friends had given him any advice,

0:38:580:39:01

so, really, he just blundered on.

0:39:010:39:04

Sir Joshua left to future art a volume rich and...

0:39:040:39:09

His audience began to drift away,

0:39:090:39:11

but one person who remained there was Turner's father.

0:39:110:39:15

But it is the lot of all to follow, and mine is a humble one.

0:39:150:39:19

Turner's father was his closest ally.

0:39:220:39:25

he was his guide and his companion.

0:39:250:39:27

His mother, though, was a different story.

0:39:270:39:29

She was a family secret.

0:39:320:39:34

There is some evidence from relatively early in Turner's life

0:39:370:39:42

that his mother was accused of having "an ungovernable temper".

0:39:420:39:46

His mum is going crazy.

0:39:470:39:49

She's a really loose cannon at many times, so we're led to believe.

0:39:490:39:53

And Turner has to incarcerate her. He has to effectively section her.

0:39:550:40:00

Turner's mother was committed to Bedlam Hospital.

0:40:030:40:06

Whether she was clinically insane, we simply don't know.

0:40:080:40:12

What we do know, and this is, I think,

0:40:120:40:15

a stain on Turner's reputation, and his father's for that matter,

0:40:150:40:18

is that they could have elected

0:40:180:40:21

a more humane, private treatment for her, and they didn't.

0:40:210:40:25

The very year his mother was incarcerated, Turner left home

0:40:330:40:36

and moved to Harley Street, home to rich connoisseurs and patrons.

0:40:360:40:41

She died in 1804 in Bedlam.

0:40:440:40:49

This was not something, I think, that Turner was keen for people to know,

0:40:490:40:55

as he was moving up the ladder in his profession.

0:40:550:40:58

There's one very small and poignant profile drawing

0:41:030:41:09

of a woman in a mob cap in an early sketchbook.

0:41:090:41:12

She's off guard, she's musing, she's looking down.

0:41:130:41:18

I think that might well be her.

0:41:180:41:20

With the mother gone, Dad comes to live with Turner,

0:41:230:41:28

you know, he mixes his paints for him,

0:41:280:41:30

so it is a kind of "me and me old dad" kind of cockney thing.

0:41:300:41:35

Turner never married, and so his father, as time went on,

0:41:370:41:41

gave up the shop and became the person who looked after Turner.

0:41:410:41:46

As a personality, Turner was quite complex, very complex.

0:41:480:41:53

His relationship with women was not at all conventional.

0:41:540:41:57

He had a liaison with a widow of a musician called Sarah Danby

0:41:570:42:02

and she bore him two daughters.

0:42:020:42:04

But he doesn't seem to have been a particularly doting parent.

0:42:040:42:10

They were maintained at a separate residence.

0:42:100:42:13

As far as his character was concerned,

0:42:140:42:16

it really depended who you talked to.

0:42:160:42:18

When the French Romantic painter Delacroix met Turner in 1832,

0:42:210:42:25

he described him as "uncouth, like an English farmer", he said,

0:42:250:42:30

"with a hard, cold demeanour."

0:42:300:42:33

Constable, who admired Turner's art, didn't like him either.

0:42:330:42:36

But Turner was never going to fit in with his fellow Romantics,

0:42:380:42:41

either as a person or as an artist.

0:42:410:42:44

This is his picture of a factory in the West Midlands.

0:42:480:42:51

For the Romantics, factories were the dark side of progress,

0:42:510:42:55

but for Turner, they were a source of inspiration.

0:42:550:42:58

He coaxes the most exquisite, beautiful pictorial effect

0:43:000:43:05

out of the blast furnaces of industrial Dudley.

0:43:050:43:09

Those people who visited Dudley, especially literary commentators,

0:43:120:43:16

were often appalled by what they saw.

0:43:160:43:19

Dickens was horrified by the Black country

0:43:190:43:22

and the effects of industrialization.

0:43:220:43:25

But what Turner is representing

0:43:250:43:27

are not what Blake described as the Dark Satanic Mills.

0:43:270:43:30

It is an image which certainly doesn't criticise

0:43:320:43:36

the industrial revolution in any way.

0:43:360:43:38

When Turner paints industry, he does paint it in a unjudgemental way,

0:43:380:43:42

yes, and I don't think that kind of Romantic nostalgia

0:43:420:43:48

that we perhaps tend to get rather obsessed with nowadays

0:43:480:43:50

really occurred to Turner at all.

0:43:500:43:53

If you went into the valleys

0:43:530:43:55

and you went into the industrial cities, there it was,

0:43:550:43:58

there was industry, this was now, this was progress,

0:43:580:44:00

this was the modern world.

0:44:000:44:02

The modern world in 1842 looked like this.

0:44:050:44:09

A steamboat in a vortex of rain and snow.

0:44:100:44:13

And Turner is doing something extraordinary.

0:44:130:44:15

His painting has become loose, less figurative,

0:44:160:44:20

more atmospheric, less solid.

0:44:200:44:22

It's perhaps one of the most extreme pictures he ever showed.

0:44:240:44:29

You cannot tell where the sea ends and the air begins.

0:44:290:44:33

It has no sides, no middle, nothing to hold onto.

0:44:350:44:40

The only solid thing is this little steam boat.

0:44:400:44:44

But this isn't just a boat in a storm.

0:44:460:44:49

There are other forces at work in this painting.

0:44:490:44:52

There's an order in the chaos.

0:44:520:44:54

An order which has everything to do with the scientific discoveries

0:44:550:44:59

that were changing our understanding of nature.

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It all begins with the scientist Michael Faraday.

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In 1821, he demonstrated the theory of magnetic rotation,

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with the world's first electric motor.

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The connection being now made from the plates to the copper wire

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and to the mercury below,

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the copper wire immediately begins to revolve

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around the pole of the magnet.

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A decade later, Faraday showed that an electric current

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could be generated though exposure to a magnetic field.

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The relation that holds between the fixed magnetic pole,

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the moving wire or metal,

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and the direction of the current involved...

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At the same time, Turner and Faraday's friend,

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the mathematician Mary Somerville, was introducing the idea

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of electro-magnetism to a wider public in a bestselling book.

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"Dr Faraday observes that such is the facility with which electricity

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"is evolved by the earth's magnetism,

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"that scarcely any piece of metal can be moved in contact with others."

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Turner knew Mary Somerville very well indeed.

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They were good friends.

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Mary Somerville talked many times of going to Turner's studio

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and always being welcomed.

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"Even a ship passing over the surface of the water

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"in northern or southern latitudes

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"ought to have electric currents running directly across

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"the line of her motion.

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"Curious electro-magnetic combinations probably exist

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"which have never yet been noticed."

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What is Turner doing in Snowstorm?

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Is he describing just the kind of things

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Somerville and Faraday were talking about?

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Is this the visual manifestation

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of the invisible magnetic forces in nature?

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The key point for Snowstorm, in my view,

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is the visual parallel that it creates between the sea

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as a vast, uncontrollable force, and the invisible powers

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of the earth's magnetism.

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Underneath the chaos, there's a real regularity.

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The waves have a sort of a hairy quality that gets very near

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the effect of a putting iron filings in the magnetic field

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around with a bar magnet and how they gather around the bar magnet.

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I think there is a direct connection.

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Magnetism was in the air.

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Michael Faraday was working on it, Turner and Faraday had conversations,

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their mutual friend Mary Somerville

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was beginning to write about these and other scientific topics,

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and making them much more publically accessible.

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All these things go together, and suddenly Snowstorm appears.

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It's the idea of a ship as the focus of all this massive energy.

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This isn't a scientific diagram.

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Turner is not trying to explain the earth's magnetism,

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but he's trying to express what this power is.

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We are looking at a visual metaphor.

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Turner had found a new way of painting.

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He'd created a visual language to express nature's hidden forces.

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Whatever he's understood about magnetism and about science,

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the key thing he's taken from it is an understanding of flux

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and dynamism, and if you stand in front of the Snowstorm

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and look at that tilted horizon, and look at that vortex,

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you realise that you yourself have been caught up in that same rhythm.

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By 1840, Turner, now in his 60s, was making regular trips to Margate,

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a seaside town on the Kent coast.

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He'd been visiting Margate since his childhood.

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Now, it was a second home.

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The thing about Margate is Margate is very gritty,

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and has really strange light and amazing sunsets,

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and it's got a lot of fecundity in the atmosphere,

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there is something sexy about it.

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And I think artists and people pick up on that.

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In Margate, Turner settled in with a new mistress, Mrs Booth.

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This may be a picture of her.

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It's part of a stash of erotic drawings by Turner,

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found after his death.

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Of course, when he became close to Mrs Booth,

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his landlady in Margate, he used to called himself Admiral Booth

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and pretend to be a retired naval man.

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There are stories late in life when he was getting more reclusive.

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If he took a cab, he would get it to drop him off several streets away,

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so that people wouldn't discover his real identity.

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Turner loved to cultivate this air of mystery.

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Few people were allowed to see him at work.

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But one artist who did was Edward Rippingille,

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who witnessed Turner putting the final touches

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to one of his paintings.

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"In one part of the mysterious proceedings, Turner,

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"who worked almost entirely with his pallet knife,

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"was observed to be rolling and spreading

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"a lump of half transparent stuff over his picture."

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What is that he's plastering his picture with?

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"Presently the work was finished. Turner gathered his tools together

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"and then, with his face still to the wall, went sliding off."

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All it was for these witnesses was a master magician

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doing something that they couldn't comprehend.

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OK, you want to see how it's done, here's how it's done.

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This is how it was done in 1844,

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one of Turner's last great oil paintings.

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A train hurtling out of the canvas into the future.

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It's all there in this one extraordinary picture.

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The scientific discoveries, the engineering breakthroughs,

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the industrial upheavals come together

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in Turner's vision of the new Britain.

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It's about atmosphere - a train crossing a bridge

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puffing out smoke and soot on a rather wet, misty day

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in the Thames Valley.

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It just the title. Rain, Steam And Speed.

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Everything pouring, you know. It's kind of like, it's exciting.

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It's hitting the same note as Temeraire.

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The world of old motion drifting along in that little boat,

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while da-da-dun, da-da-da-dun - this sort of coming along.

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The fire box has almost eaten through

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the casing of the engine chassis as it roars towards you.

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This is the Great Western Railway.

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This is Brunel's fantastic engineering achievement.

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It's the jewel in the crown of the railway system.

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The railway bridge over which the train is going

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is Isambard Kingdom Brunel's.

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So it is a homage to one of the defining figures

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of Victorian Britain.

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When this picture is painted, we are about a decade-and-a-half

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into the history of the railways.

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Remember, before the railways arrived,

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nobody had gone faster than a horse could gallop,

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and now we have these railways that, even by 1844,

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when this picture is done, are going 30, 40 miles an hours,

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and soon to go 50, 60 miles an hour. Unheard-of speeds.

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It really is transformational.

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The Great Western was even responsible for standardising time.

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There was a time difference between, say, Exeter and London, of about

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15 to 20 minutes, because it was set by rising of the sun.

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And it was thanks to the Great Western

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that we have Greenwich Mean Time.

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If you look very closely,

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there's a hare running for its life in front of the train.

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The hare is, in Britain, anyway, the fastest natural animal.

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So you've got this contrast between the modern,

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industrial speedy machine and the natural speedy animal.

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The train in Rain, Steam And Speed is not just a train rushing at us.

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It's also a reminder of the modern world,

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and how the modern world is changing the landscape,

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changing society, changing individual lives.

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The coming of the railways, the destruction of many, many homes

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of ordinary people, especially building the stations in London

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and all the cities, driving though old England.

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The people that most resented it are, by now,

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the ageing Romantics like Wordsworth and Ruskin,

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who fear that these hoards would invade their beauteous landscapes,

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but Turner's painting is a great cheer for Brunel, I think.

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When the novelist and art critic William Thackeray

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first saw Rain, Steam And Speed,

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he knew he was looking at something completely new in painting.

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"The rain in the astounding picture is composed of dabs of dirty putty

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"slapped on to the canvas with a trowel.

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"The sunshine scintillates out of very thick, smeary lumps

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"of chrome yellow.

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"The world has never seen anything like this picture."

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He's using paint to make us feel what it was like to be there.

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I mean, Thackerary commented on the fact that when you got close

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to the picture, you really couldn't get away

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from the thickness of the paint.

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We shouldn't say that only Impressionism and the Modern movement

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had these revelations.

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I think what makes Turner extraordinary is that he came upon

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these understandings in the 19th century.

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Look at the rest of Victorian painting around this time,

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including mates of his like Wilkie, who he loved.

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I mean, it's pathetically rudimentary and laborious and literal.

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The notion that you, as a fellow of the Royal Academy

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would make this maelstrom of paint and deliver it as art.

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You tell me who else is doing that. The answer is no-one.

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It isn't simply nice, little curlicues of smoke

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coming out of a funnel.

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It's somebody who understands how steam power

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has harnessed heat and turned it into motion.

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Nobody else had found a way of painting that transformation.

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He wanted to instinctively see if belching smoke

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and a cantering train would generate that kind of beauty.

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What he does is the industrial Sublime.

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It is a kind of modernisation, perhaps, of the Sublime.

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It's making it applicable to a modern age,

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which is making scientific and technological advances

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and is leaning to harness nature.

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You know, the Sublime usually presupposes the intrusion

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of something mechanical as the enemy.

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It's not the enemy for Turner.

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The most atmospheric of all of Turner's paintings,

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where all the elements come together - earth, air, fire and water -

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becomes a celebration of progress.

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For Turner, industry becomes the Sublime.

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It's as though those natural forces have been harnessed by mankind

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for their own betterment.

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The volcanoes and hurricanes that might traditionally be associated

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with the Sublime now occur inside boilers and drive pistons.

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No-one had thought like that, painted like that, imagined it like that.

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And it's not going to be repeated, arguably,

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until one gets in to the 1910s.

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He was painting what was happening, the reality of that time,

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because he had his finger on the pulse.

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He managed to achieve something quite phenomenal,

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and that's what makes Turner a great artist.

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I think he's phenomenally important for the history of art

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and the history of Britain.

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This, then, is JMW Turner,

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Britain's great Romantic landscape painter,

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who delivered to us a visionary story of the Industrial Revolution.

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Who painted nature, and at the same time

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revealed the wonders of science and invention.

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Who used paint to herald a new world.

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