Turner's Thames

On his deathbed, in 1851, the great painter of landscapes JMW Turner

is supposed to have said, "The sun is God."

Did he mean that light is everything?

Light is certainly something everyone can get,

but in art, it's not at all obvious what "light" is.

Look at how that sunset over the River Thames is painted.

Even today, after the whole history of modern art,

Turner's surfaces are still startling.

'Why are they so different?

'And why is a painted sunset by him

'so different to anyone's idea of a lovely sunset?'

Broken light, light and dark, unpredictable shapes,

Turner makes light the vehicle of feeling.

And he found inspiration for an amazing variety of ways

to express feeling from the River Thames.

The play of light on its surface,

the way the river reflects light, throws light, creates atmospheres.

All this captured Turner's attention throughout his career.

He stalked those effects first with quick sketches on paper,

and then, back in the studio, with his strange techniques,

mixing and merging materials and mediums,

often moving paint around with his fingers

in the search to find an equivalent in paint

for the visual surprise and delight

he experienced out here in reality.

It isn't just the picture, but the way the picture is done,

the treatment of it, that is important.

'Turner trained his impulses and responses

'so they served the big machine of his vision.

'The landscapes he painted weren't already out there

'just waiting to be magically transferred onto canvas.

'He selected certain things,

'he found a visual language for capturing them,

'and he put them all into an arrangement

'that suited a certain idea.

'I'm here with my sketchbook drawing what I see in Richmond Park

'with the River Thames nearby.

'A place Turner used to haunt with his sketchbook.'

What would be the difference

if it was Turner up here 200 years ago drawing what he sees?

The first thing to say is that we're biologically the same thing,

so we're really seeing the same thing.

And, because of millions of years of human development, we're probably liking the same thing.

We're liking the light landing on those crackly branches,

and the shapes of the clouds above,

and the way that sometimes the light lights everything up

and you get a certain kind of rhythm running across the scene.

And sometimes that light changes

and you get a sort of rather flatter swathes of different textures.

But, of course, one big difference is that Turner is a genius

and I'm just a TV presenter drawing.

But the other thing is that

Turner brings all the cultural baggage of his times

to what he's seeing.

So where I see crackly branches and twisty lines

and the lovely sloping curve,

I'm trying to describe them from a kind of zero upwards,

cos my brain has been fried

by modern art and surrealism and conceptualism,

so I've got no sort of mental framework to really draw a landscape.

Whereas Turner has a massively complicated, beautiful, poetic mental framework

of what he's doing with his paintings.

So with a drawing looking out at trees,

he's looking for visual data that is going to go into those paintings.

So his eye is honed, on the lookout for romantic subjects.

What does romantic mean?

It means the artist's feelings are really what are being conveyed.

And they're feelings that are very highly strung.

He's sort of feeling on behalf of his audience.

So he's looking for things in the landscape,

which can stand for a feeling, a feeling that perhaps

originates in him already or in something divine

rather than in the landscape - it's a kind of carrier for that.

Throughout a life of travel all over Britain and Europe,

Turner always returned to this relationship with the Thames,

which went right back to the beginning of his own life story.

He was born, in 1775, only a short walk away from the river.

His father was a barber and a wigmaker

with a shop in London's Covent Garden.

It's likely Turner actually sold his first pictures from the barber shop.

He also worked as a scene painter in the theatre in nearby Drury Lane.

At different times in his life,

Turner set up studios and homes on the Thames.

'Let's join him on his own boat, in Isleworth, West London,

'nine miles upriver from where he was born.

'It's 1805, the year of the Battle of Trafalgar,

'when Britain is an island fighting for survival

'and Britons must fall back on their island's resources.'

For Turner, that means the River Thames.

He's already 30, wealthy and famous.

In this year, he rents a house here.

And, for month after month, he travels on his own boat,

a floating studio, up and down the river sketching and painting.

What I'm seeing now is very much

what Turner himself would have seen 200 years ago

and what he would have enjoyed.

I think the particular quality it had for him

was of being very gently dramatic.

You know it's the river, you know it's the sound of the birds,

you know it's the banks and the trees and the reflections...

But you never experience any of those things the same way twice,

including the kind of thing I'm seeing now,

where there's so many gulls swarming about in the sky,

all in a way making a sort of sculptural division of the sky,

so the whole thing is becoming visually alive.

It's both calm, quiet and placid

and full of activity, and that's because of the effect of the light.

So, for one thing,

I'm seeing a beam of light hitting the water,

breaking up into 1,000 different coloured points of light

and crisscrossing the little tracks made by the ducks and the gulls.

'We're having all this pleasure in the spontaneity and delight

'of light on the water and the shapes going by.

'But Turner didn't just want to be happy in nature.

'His work was to find a way

'to make paint actually capture those fleeting moments.'

All the shapes made by those trees

are reflected exactly in the river, they're never the same.

The contours where the light meets the dark is always changing,

changing because of the light and that's...

The thing that would've been viscerally exciting for Turner,

cos that's what he spent every day doing and thinking about,

that was his practice as an artist.

On the Thames, Turner built up a vast range of sketches -

his painting language was as various

as the scenes of life of the river that he recorded -

ferries, passengers, architecture,

all brought to life by light.

Scribbly, loose, looping marks,

scudding, jagged, stuttering marks -

surfaces that seem seamless

and surfaces that are exciting and broken.

What he sees and how he sees it,

the two cannot be delinked.

And Turner's great instinct

is to exploit this psychological fact of art

in a totally original way.

He carries over the surprise of a sketch done on the spot,

where every mark is decisive and has its own dramatic power,

into the oil paintings he worked up in his studio.

Let's go back a few years to see an example

of how Turner is beginning to make one kind of painterly language

feed into another.

'It's an early work first exhibited in 1797.

'Today, it's housed in one of the storage racks

'in London's Tate Britain.'

This is one of the earliest

oil paintings that Turner ever did of a Thames scene.

It's called Moonlight, A Study At Millbank.

A study is a kind of category of picture.

It suggests that the thing is not

at a polished, magnificent, finished stage.

It's more like a step along the way.

But it has enough energy, vivacity,

beauty in itself to be worth looking at.

And this certainly has that,

considering it's done by an artist

who's only 22 years old at the time.

Turner by now was pretty sophisticated

in the way he could use paint.

He'd been using oil paint for two or three years

and had been working in watercolour for much longer.

And the fluidity and looseness

of the watercolour medium

is very evident in this oil painting.

The way every single object in it

seems to flow together

to make a very convincing,

yet crisp and focussed composition.

It tells us that Turner's lifelong interest in light

is not just as a natural phenomenon

and not just as the absence of dark

but it's actually about mood, feeling, emotion, ideas.

It's very striking that this earliest of his pictures,

of the Thames and light, it's in the middle of the night,

when you'd expect there not to be any light at all.

And he takes that element of surprise

and makes it into a whole drama.

This mood of beautiful, soulful, night-time gloom.

By the early 1800s, the Thames was Britain's key commercial waterway.

And, through technological inventiveness

and colonial exploitation,

the nation had become the greatest trading power in the world.

Turner benefited artistically from the beauty of the river,

but also from all that prosperity through the wealthy aristocrats

and new entrepreneurs who bought his work.

Turner won new clients through innovation in business,

as well as innovation in painting.

The general public knew him from his offerings every year

in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition,

but his clients could also come to his house,

here in a swanky part of London,

which he set up as a showroom.

This is how it looked inside.

This is a painting by the Victorian artist George Jones,

a great admirer of Turner.

History records some of the aspects of his hero's existence here.

'They tell us about the difference between the emotion of art

'and the actual personality of Turner.

'One is condensed, rich, universal -

'anyone can be moved and transported by it.

'The other is, well, cranky.

'Turner was so clever that he made a huge amount of money from his art

'when he was still in his 20s,

'which enabled him to buy the Harley Street house.'

And he was so audacious that he gradually turned that house

into a gallery for selling his work.

As a kind of alternative to the Royal Academy

where only Turner's work was seen.

The niece of Turner's mistress, when he first found this place,

became a kind of gallery assistant for Turner,

showing in the wealthy aristocrats who came to buy Turner's work.

After a while, she got a disfiguring skin disease

so she wore a load of bandages around her face

when she showed them in.

And Turner's father, who Turner referred to all his life as Daddy,

worked as Turner's studio assistant for 30 years on his hands and knees

preparing the new canvases that Turner was going to work on.

While Turner himself on these studio visits would be in a side room

looking on through a peephole

making sure that nobody touched the work

or, worse still, tried to sketch it.

In which case, Turner would rush in and shoo them out.

It was a combination of things we know very well in art today.

Big money going with art

with something absolutely separate from anything we know now

and that is the sheer warmth

of the extreme, almost comic, human eccentricity of the situation.

'Turner's private gallery for his own paintings

'showed his ambition as a modern artist.

'But the previous centuries of classical art,

'which I'm looking at now in the displays

'at London's National Gallery, were very important to him.

'A man just over five feet tall,

'he wanted to be part of the heights of all that noble achievement.

'What unites everything here, except pictures by Turner,

'is the way human beings dominate the scenes -

'gesturing, posing, swooning, standing for symbolic great ideas.

'The art of the past was considered

'by the cultured people of Turner's time as connected to poetry.

'Turner got hold of that idea, but pushed it

'in ways that radically transformed what painting was expected to be.

'He painted old myths and so on,

'like the artist geniuses of the past did,'

but also what it was like to be alive right now in his own times.

And whether it was classical or modern,

he gave them each the same epic poetic treatment.

His greatest transformation was

to make pictures of mere landscapes

as important, as full of big ideas and feelings,

as pictures of gods and heroes.

He did it through his treatment of surfaces,

the visual metaphors he came up with for the feeling of light.

'A picture by Turner of the ancient city of Carthage,

'supposedly founded by the legendary Queen Dido,

'which Turner exhibited in 1815,

'shows immediately where Turner always laid the emphasis -

'not on individual human characters,

'but on landscape and atmosphere.'

The whole painting.

Its visual, immediate appeal.

The way it works as a painting

as opposed to the story that it stands for.

The whole painting is in that yellow

and its repeat here.

Above, it's a flat yellow glow.

Here, it's patterned, refracted,

almost geometric - this complicated illusion.

Simple, complicated.

A surface of water

throwing off reflections.

So it's a painting about reflection

and you can imagine that everything else you're seeing in it,

all this busy classical imagery

of marble pillars

and the ancient world,

is all somehow made

out of that glowing light.

The mood of the picture,

its emotion, the story,

all comes from Turner's treatment

of water and light.

And its concentration in this painting on that treatment

so that it's all about reflection.

Turner was an awkward cuss as a personality,

a social outsider who made good but never lost his cockney accent,

but what he shared with his noble clients,

who'd been brought up much more posh than him,

was reverence for long ago giants of painting.

And the most popular when Turner was growing up

was the 17th-century French artist Claude Lorrain.

'In his will, Turner donated certain paintings by himself to the nation

'on condition that they were hung for ever near paintings by Claude.

'A fishing scene by Turner next to his picture of Carthage.

'Behind me a painting by Claude.

'And here, another one by Claude.

'All in the same space.'

Turner amplified Claude's moody light effects,

but instead of timeless calm and placidity,

Turner brought in great turbulent feeling.

In the effort to catch up,

he takes over and creates his own thing -

Turner becomes the great Romantic artist.

Turner's Romantic ideal was that everything should seem to be

either on the verge of dissolving or just about to be born -

the whole of existence, God, humanity,

the world, all arriving or departing

in an awesome blaze of light.

A glow. An inner glow.

It actually seems to be coming

from inside this painting by Claude

and then spreading and expanding outwards,

so everything is arranged

and planned in the painting

to make that glow dramatic.

And that's happening whether it's a Claude or a painting by Turner.

Turner brought these pictures together

in order to show that visual idea.

Claude was supposed to be a classical artist

who was interested in a poetic vision of the world.

Turner wonders what that form of words could mean.

He wants to show that it has something to do

with the way light is treated. This glow emanating from the painting.

It's not just that Turner wants to be associated

with a great man from art history.

It's a particular visual idea that unites them.

That unites Turner with that great man.

Turner's imaginative flights

come from near-at-hand inspiration.

The water in Carthage

is really the water of the Thames.

He drew and painted imagined classical ruins

on the river banks he knew very well.

You can see one of his sketchbook pictures of the Thames

becoming the ancient city of Carthage in its dawning light.

Here's some other sketches

of a kind of architecture

inspired by classicism.

This time it's plans for a villa

Turner wanted to build for himself by the river,

which he did, in Twickenham.

He called the place Solus Lodge.

And here it is.

"Solus" is the Latin base for the word isolation.

Turner got plenty of that out here -

'a solo existence except for the presence of his father.

'Turner was a bachelor all his life,

'married only to his art.

'He had mistresses he visited occasionally,

'that he was very quiet about,

'and illegitimate children by one of them,

'about whom very little is now known.

'His father did the shopping and cleaning in Solus Lodge

'and prepared Turner's canvases,

'while Turner carried on the business of being Turner.

'In those days, Twickenham was rural,

'the villa was surrounded by fields,

'and he could see the glinting River Thames from his top window.

'It was the dynamic visual element in a leafy paradise.

'Ten miles away, down the winding course of the river,

'Turner sold and exhibited his art.

'And as a professor at the Royal Academy,

'he gave lectures on art theory.

'But up here, in his solitary haven, he created. He drew and sketched

'and he did something else vital to his paintings - he read poetry.

'As an artist, it wasn't just the traditions of painting

'that influenced him, but also the traditions of poetry.

'Radical new poets emerged in Turner's time -

'Wordsworth and Coleridge and then Byron and Shelley.

'Turner was the painter equivalent of those figures.

'Like them, he expressed feeling through descriptions of landscapes.

'But also like them, pushing forward and being advanced

'went naturally with a profound interest in the poetic past.'

In the culture of Turner's time,

because of the poetry of Alexander Pope

and other now lesser-known figures,

the beauty of Thames-side scenes like this,

with its glorious light,

was appreciated as a portal

on to another dimension.

As well as the Thames being literally a link with the past,

there was also a sense of a sort of golden age

of the poetic classical past,

the age of gods and goddesses in nature,

that somehow lingered on in the look of the Thames in the modern present.

Turner more than signed up to this idea,

it was really the driving motor of his Thames landscapes.

Their multi-layered meanings were possible because, in his head,

the Thames was already a poetic, multi-layered experience.

Turner wrote poetry himself.

He stuck bits of it on the backs of his canvases.

He had lines of it printed in the catalogues of his exhibitions.

When he wasn't painting in his purpose-built villa in Twickenham,

he was writing, making up poetry in the house or out here in the garden.

Today it's not so important for us

to worry whether or not Turner's poetry was any good.

It tended not to have any endings,

he just streamed it out in his notebooks and sketchbooks,

without very much revision.

As if, when he was doing his visual art,

he was working hard and concentrating,

whereas, when he was poeticising,

he was on a kind of mental holiday.

The important thing is that it was a poetic vision of art that drove him.

Turner's written poetry was the ordinary sort of thing

that was necessary to produce the absolutely stupendous thing -

his poetic painting.

Artists were conditioned to believe

that poetry was superior to visual art

because it could communicate more.

The challenge for art

was to get that multi-layered quality that poetry has.

Turner does exactly this in a picture

that poetically juxtaposes opposites -

ordinary life and the life of the mightiest in the land.

Turner often didn't know what finished pictures

his quick sketches would end up serving.

Here, they provide the information for a scene

that has Windsor Castle more or less in the middle in a misty haze.

The light effect he's dealing with here is atmosphere -

the very particular mood that light can be the cause of,

as it divides up reality,

creating a certain atmosphere.

He's concocting all this

so that the real focus is down here.

Farm labourers in a moment of rest

on a hard day's work.

The picture is called

Ploughing Up Turnips Near Slough.

The year is 1809. We're at war.

Our little island must sustain itself

because there can be no foreign trade at the moment.

The King, King George III in his castle, is known as Farmer George.

This is a rich example

of where the Thames can take Turner imaginatively.

It's Turner, the social commentary artist.

You've got this very real scene below,

of the cows and turnips

and the workers and their baskets,

and then, way above them in the misty distance, the monarch.

Where is Turner mentally in all of this and where are we?

Remember, it's 200 years ago, not today.

I think we're the middle-class

looking down affectionately at the workers

and up respectfully at the King.

We're all patriots.

Even Turner, even though he's none of these social classes.

Turner is the maverick artist,

the visionary who's using the Thames

as a trigger for an idealised scene

that evokes the texture of everyday life as it was lived in 1809.

For Turner, the waters of the Thames

also suggested another big idea of his age.

"How sublime!" we might say today of a sight like this.

The beautiful river with its glowing light,

not really thinking what the word "sublime" means.

The Sublime is a concept from the 18th century

with roots in the classical past.

The philosopher Sir Edmund Burke

looked at the way reality is apprehended

through sense perceptions

and he developed the idea

that there was a dimension of the irrational and the terrifying

that was something like beauty, but separate from it.

He called this the Sublime dimension.

Burke was influenced

by strange old anonymous writings from Ancient Rome,

which historians have agreed to attribute

to a fictional author called Longinus.

These said that the effect

of Sublime emotions and Sublime language in poetry

was a kind of elevated moral ecstasy.

The poet Wordsworth in Turner's own time,

writing about the Sublime and the Beautiful,

said that the poetic imagination

elevates man like "an unfather'd vapour"

and makes him forever unsettled.

Artists were enthralled by the notion.

It meant something like nature appreciation but also nature terror.

Turner himself was formed as an artist

with this concept always playing on his mind.

Nature is out of scale with you,

it towers above you.

It meant something like God, art,

the past, the ultimate -

the meaning of meanings.

Today, it's often used to mean indifference to feeling,

as in somebody is "sublimely unaware" of something

or "sublimely above" something.

In Turner's time, the Sublime implied

the greatest intensity of feeling -

a state of nature the sight of which

immediately transports us to a higher level.

When I see the Thames at its most epic,

I see something that's beautiful

and capable of a lot of different types of beauty,

but also something symbolic.

Simply because it's been there for so long.

I look at this view of the Thames from Richmond Hill,

looking out over towards Windsor,

and I see something that's my present,

but also an epic past experienced by millions of people.

I think that potential of the magnificent Thames

as something that could be inspiring

is what Turner was interested in.

Whether it really is inspiring

or whether it's just a matter-of-fact everyday experience,

well, that's the art of Turner.

If he's going to raise it up to that great level or not.

He painted this very scene a couple of times directly

and countless times indirectly.

Bits of that glinting river

and those classical trees appear in many pictures by him.

Expressing classical themes, historical themes

or just the beauty of the everyday landscape.

When he painted the picture

England: Richmond Hill On The Prince Regent's Birthday,

using this as a backdrop,

the mood then was war and peace.

England had just come to the end

of a 20-year war with France.

Everyone, including Turner,

lived in daily anxiety of invasion by the French.

And now, that anxiety was lifted and it was time,

as the painting appears to express, for celebration.

So, if I were to walk down those steps now into that image,

I'd be walking into a scene

capable of a multitude of different symbolic meanings.

Here is Turner's painting

England: Richmond Hill On The Prince Regent's Birthday.

It's Turner's big public statement to the nation

showing them really what they want to see.

This mood of celebration following the darkness of the war years.

The war with Napoleon. Now, finally over.

I think Turner is really bringing out

all his skills learnt as a teenager when he was a scene painter.

It's more the artifice side of Turner's great expressive art

than the reality side. Usually, there's a tension between the two.

Here, he's pumping up the artifice.

The meaning Turner wants to get over

is the great and the good at play symbolising hope after war.

The Sublime dimension is the huge scale of the landscape -

hope and play go with royalty's awesomely limitless power.

Turner gives all this a tangible feeling

by the exaggerated high contrast

of light and shade on the distant horizon.

If you were only seeing the rather stiff party of the Royals

all dressed up and civilisedly celebrating peace,

it'd be a very different picture experience

than it is with the light above.

You've got the light radiating out

and then seeming to be conveyed

by Turner's scene-painting skills,

on the surface of the Thames

right up to the party.

So a scenic view, which seems slightly artificial,

is made believable by light.

But also, through this element of contrast,

it's made very vivid and rather beautiful.

In reality, the public was not at all enchanted by royalty.

They thought the Prince Regent, soon to be George IV,

was fat and debauched and extravagant,

but he was also their figurehead, the focus for their patriotism.

Turner's idealisation of royalty was all about magically transforming

the ordinary into the extraordinary

and the predictable into the mysterious.

Was Turner an artistic radical and a conservative royalist?

Or just an artist businessman hoping to get the attention of royalty

and maybe gain a royal client?

We can only ask. In fact, nothing is known about Turner's politics.

It is known that he failed to sell this painting to anyone,

and it remained in his studio till he died.

'There was one favourite Thames journey that took Turner

'much further than the places we've seen so far,

'right up to the Thames Estuary

'and then along that to the Kent coast, ending up in Margate,

'at the time a popular holiday spot for Londoners.

'Turner had good memories of the place

'because he'd been taken here on trips as a child.

'After he became depressed

'because of his father's death in 1829, when Turner was 54,

'the place began to have a magnetic attraction for him.'

Turner knew these streets very well,

cos he came to Margate regularly for 20 years.

The attraction was the sea, the place itself, the atmosphere,

what it could do for his art. But there was also something else,

and that was the attraction of Sophia Booth,

the lady who ran the boarding house where Turner stayed,

who he, in as far as he could love anyone, pretty much loved.

They remained companions for the rest of Turner's life.

He had a sort of particular relationship to her,

which didn't involve him living with her all the time

but visiting her now and then between trips abroad, painting trips,

where he would sort of hove in at the berth that Mrs Booth offered.

All the reports we have of her are rather snobbish perhaps.

They say that she was common.

She wasn't really at the level of Turner.

She was too much of an ordinary person.

But what the relationship tells us about Turner

is the two sides of his personality.

This fantastic poetic visionary, Romantic artist

who, as a person, was rather normal,

a short, little gnomic-looking guy,

rather earthy and, in some ways,

perhaps a bit ridiculous.

But he was certainly the man who, as far as he could, loved Mrs Booth.

'No picture exists of Mrs Booth,

'but she makes a striking impression in Turner's story anyway.

'From the Sublime to the ridiculous, the sweetly ridiculous story

'of a romance between a genius of art and an illiterate woman.

'She called him "Old Un."

'She was, in fact, 25 years younger than him.

'And he called her "Dear."

'Whatever his true feelings were for her,

'Turner had no doubt about the role of emotion in his art

'and its link to colour.'

For years, Turner had been interested

in new scientific experiments in colour perception.

First, the great discoverer of the Law of Gravity, Sir Isaac Newton,

saw colour and light arranged in a certain way.

Then, the philosopher Goethe challenged Newton

and saw them arranged in a different way,

and claimed a direct connection between colours and human emotions.

Turner's belief, following Goethe's example,

in a link between colours and feelings,

influenced both his own colour diagrams,

and also heralded the arrival in his landscapes of a new visual mood -

from a sort of gentle, meditative, visual poetry

in Isleworth and Twickenham

to soaring abstract tremendousness at Margate.

You can see this happening in a show of Turner's work

at the public gallery at Margate named after him,

Turner Contemporary.

Margate, this little seaside town at the end of the Thames Estuary,

becomes the taking off point for a cosmic vision.

Everything real in the picture -

the town itself, the sails of a yacht approaching the coast,

everything real becomes dissolved

in favour of a whirling ball of colour.

Turner only had about five years left to live when he painted this.

His picture Yacht Approaching The Coast

shows him at his most in touch with himself, his most indulgent,

his most in touch with his idea of cosmic meaning.

This central focus of pure white

surrounded by yellow, red, green, blue

and these areas of coloured white -

green-white, yellow-white, orange-white,

and that strange scratchy red that emanates from below the yacht

and is seen again here, mottled over with pasty pearlescent white.

Science tells us that colour is light.

Turner tells us the sun,

which is the ultimate source of all light,

is God, which is a pretty freaky idea.

Turner didn't literally see those spectrum colours

straining to get through the misty whites of the spray at Margate.

He saw the reality of nature on the coast

and he selected from what he saw, as he always did.

But the rest he invented -

he was imposing a vision of colour that came from science,

making a natural scene into a new kind of almost abstract art.

The big skies of the Kent coast, which Turner revered.

He said there was no sky on Earth more beautiful

than the one over Thanet,

and the flat landscape offered him lots of opportunity

to capture a natural light effect

we naturally associate with heightened feeling -

a sunset.

What do we mean when we call a sunset Turneresque?

Something like, the "spiritual," spiritual meaning,

but what do we mean by that?

I think we think of sunsets as spiritual,

because we think of light

as affecting emotion very, very directly.

There's probably very little in nature

that has quite as direct an effect on emotions as changing light.

And a sunset is a very dramatic light.

The whole atmosphere is filled with very, very intense colour

that changes quite fast.

But when an artist is...

expressing something like those feelings

through an image of the sunset,

it's not just the literal fact of a sunset,

or the cliche of a sunset,

it's all the powers

that a painting - this created, constructed thing - has.

What is embodied in that painting

is very hard to put into words, actually,

and nothing like as easy or as glib as saying, "Marvellous sunset."

A sunset in reality

and a sentimental idea of the beauty of sunsets,

are both different to Turner's actual renditions of sunsets,

which are only partly observed nature.

They're also interpretation and selection but they are also feeling.

He moves the paint around to get an effect he has felt

as much as he's actually seen.

Turner went back and forth between Margate and London

all through the 1830s.

Memories of the national triumph

of the Battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo were fading in that decade

and public life was dominated by political squabbles,

by hatred for the weakness and dishonesty of the government,

and news of radicals and modernists

agitating for progressive legislation.

Riots regularly broke out over the price of bread.

'Turner, now old and eccentric,

'neither left wing nor right wing,

'was the solitary king of light,

'all its moods, its expressive powers,

'and the society he lived in was giving him'

increasingly rich material for his gifts.

The modern world offered him new opportunities

for a synthesis of the real and the symbolic.

One day, the very heart of government gave him a great subject

and the kind of light he chose to express it

was all-consuming radiance.

You're looking at something violent and horrific

but also awesomely spectacular

so you can't tear your eyes away.

The burning down of the Houses of Parliament.

This is an event that actually happened

on the night of October 16th 1834.

For some unknown reason, both houses,

the House Of Lords and the House Of Commons, caught fire.

Within a few hours, each was reduced to a pile of smoking rubble.

Turner actually witnessed that event.

These are his watercolour evocations

of a sort of series of glimpses of what it was like.

He rushed down there to the shore

with students from the Royal Academy.

They hired a boat. Rowed out into the middle of the Thames

and Turner made a lot of pencil sketches

of what he was seeing as well as mental notes.

And, within a few days, he'd worked up these watercolours.

The first one is actually the most abstract.

But in that one, you know exactly what's happening.

You can feel those flames,

you can see the night sky over the Thames at Westminster

filled with a radiating fiery glow.

Why is it that Turner felt that he had to rush down there?

After all, there are a lot of artists in London at the time

but it's only Turner who does this series of watercolours

and two spectacular oil paintings.

All of which are amazing milestones in the history of art.

I think the reason is that Turner is the artist of natural light effects.

He has a furious hunger to document

what the natural world is like and how it is revealed by light.

But he is also the artist

whose mind is constantly whirling with big ideas.

So in this apocalyptic end-of-the-world scene,

there's also the national mood.

The nation's dissatisfaction

with a corrupt government

and all these pressures in recent decades

on the government to reform.

And now they see it spectacularly,

literally caving in

and burnt to the ground.

At 9:30 that evening,

when the roof of one of the buildings collapses,

the whole crowd erupts with cheers.

It's a weird soaring moment of national anarchy.

Who knows if Turner himself was cheering

or if he was too busy scribbling with his pencil?

But, certainly, the light effect of radiance

has a mood corollary

of exultant national anarchy.

Now you're looking at one of the final oil paintings,

produced a year after the fire actually happened.

He did most of it in front of a crowd of people.

The tradition of big public exhibitions

was that artists might put delicate final touches on their paintings

in the gallery before a show opened.

This was called varnishing day.

Turner brought in the large canvas to the gallery

with only a few blurry outlines on it

and, in a six-hour public performance,

he painted the whole scene,

hardly stepping back to get a good look.

They're seeing horror, triumph, fascination - all mixed up.

Turner just does the work,

picks up his stuff and leaves the building.

The Thames gave Turner his great source of meaning.

Consumerism, anxiety, doubt,

fear of nothing really meaning anything at all.

These themes of all our lives today

first strongly emerged in Turner's time.

It really was an age of transformation.

There was a gradual disappearance of nature

and a move from the country to the town,

from working the land to working in industry.

Turner's depictions of the Thames

brought together the spirituality and the commerce of the age.

He could see, in the beautiful light of its surfaces,

values that were thought to go back to an ancient time.

But also new developments

that were absolutely strange to people who lived at the time.

He could depict the low and the high,

the turnips in their muddy fields

and Windsor Castle up in the ethereal mists.

This tumult of change in his nation's life

ran alongside the multitude of layered meanings

that always characterises Turner's pictures.

And so, what has since become his most popular work,

created when he was nearing the end of his life,

can be read both as personal and a sort of national elegy.

It was inspired initially by an article he read in the papers.

The Temeraire, a battleship at the centre of England's successful fight

against the French at Trafalgar,

was moored on the Thames and was about to be destroyed.

Then, he happened to see the ship

when he was coming back on the steam packet

from one of his Margate trips.

Later, Turner often referred

to the painting he created from these experiences as "my darling."

'His title for the painting was

'The Fighting Temeraire, Tugged To Her Last Berth To Be Broken Up.'

The picture is about the magnitude and sorrow of loss.

And the role he's giving

to light here is light as metaphor.

He foregrounds the tug, which should be small,

so that it seems bigger

than the main body of the old doomed sailing ship.

The Fighting Temeraire.

How different the mood would be

if it weren't for the accent of that black buoy.

But how exactly Turner gets the balance between the two blacks,

the buoy and the tug,

with that precise sense of space in between?

The massive heavy treatment of the sunset

and then the glow beneath

where it's hard to say where light grades into dark,

so subtle is the grade.

How he gets all that is the essence of the success of the picture.

Water becomes a metaphor for feeling, for yearning,

the sense of loss. The depth of emotion that his subject is about.

A metaphor is a literary thing that comes from the mind

but the painting is made powerful by what's actually in it.

The precise shapes of those sails with the light shining on them.

That shape is repeated in that sliver of light by the buoy.

The massive liveliness of the sunset taking up so much of the picture

and then the quiet placidity

of the blue shimmering cityscape on the horizon.

It's through the doing and redoing

of all those calling and answering elements of the painting

that Turner makes light and water

into such a tremendous metaphor.

'Intensity of feeling for Turner can take many forms

'and can be realised with all sorts of subject matter.

'It can be the national mood,

'life becoming faster, harder, more emotionally distanced,

'the beginning of the kinds of lives we all lead now.

When Turner takes ordinary life as his subject

and makes a sort of epic statement about it

so ordinary life is reflected back to people

with the force and intensity of a clap of thunder, how does he do it?

The answer is technique.

He has an idea.

Then through his manipulation of materials,

through trial and error in the studio,

he finds the form that will lift a mere idea

on to the level of a vision.

Rain, Steam And Speed - The Great Western Railway. 1844.

You're looking at the new railway bridge

that was built over the River Thames at Maidenhead

only a few years before Turner painted this.

Everyone's interested in it.

It's a new force in daily life.

You've got timeless nature,

atmosphere, rain, mist

and then this new thing -

noise, speed, metal,

the arrival of the steam train.

Turner shows his black train

coming out of a white shimmery surface.

When things are shimmering,

it's uncertain where they are, even what they are.

Turner takes that uncertainty and makes it into a positive,

into a mythic image of a big change in existence.

It's a titanic piece of work, quintessential Turner

where he's telling people about existence, which they love.

And he's doing it through the magical means of depiction of light.

But you're also looking at something else - Turner's materials.

It's hard to see this image and not be amazed by them.

All that scraped matter,

the thin blue lines, like ink,

and the big build up of browny-white pasty matter.

And then that tawny brown stuff that he's made the bridge out of,

which, close up, looks like something

a builder might be doing repairs with.

It's a train in a world of blob.

Something that was expected to be happening

with abysses and chasms up mighty mountains,

which is what the theory of the Sublime in art was about,

was now happening with a train -

a sensation of horror and beauty all at once.

Turner wasn't an articulate philosopher

or an articulate analyser or an articulate social commentator.

But he was a profoundly talented artist.

And if he didn't communicate well verbally, it doesn't matter,

because he was a prophet with his paintings.

The Thames gave Turner subjects to express

what it was like to be alive.

Radical disorder is the message

of the radiant unreal spectrum reds and yellows

of the Houses of Parliament going up in flames.

In the moody waters of the Fighting Temeraire,

there's the loss of heroic and virtuous aims.

The Napoleonic era comes to an end,

this thing that has ruled everybody's life for so long

and money or commerce looks set to take over

from the noble battles and fearsome enemy that once united people.

With Rain, Steam And Speed, we see modernity.

The message of a shimmering sky over the Thames at Maidenhead

is radical change.

Turner painted more than he saw.

His paintings communicated fears and exultations of the time,

the thoughts that people had and wondered about.

And he found, in the natural world,

in the light effects on the surface of the Thames,

the opportunities for expressing those thoughts.

We can analyse Turner's processes

and learn about his ideas and influences.

But the feeling of his paintings in the first place

and, ultimately, the only sensation that matters,

is of being overwhelmed.

Like light itself, Turner believed it gave life to everything -

the feeling of awe.

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