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00:00I always felt a sense of him coming from the kind of mud.
00:21The mud of the River Thames, you know, from the earth of it.
00:30He's come from a working-class background. He doesn't get rid of his accent.
00:34I don't think he gets rid of his attitude.
00:44He was on a journey of doing something completely new that no-one else had done before.
00:51When I look at Turner's paintings, they're the epitome of drama.
01:00He didn't leave behind a diary, so it's difficult to know what he was truly thinking.
01:08He kept his personal life secret, and that was his way of living.
01:15He's an enigma. You think, well, how did you become this?
01:21He had an obsessive-compulsive need to just sketch way more than any other artist.
01:42People thought that so many of these sketches had been destroyed, lost forever.
01:47It's really only through the sketchbooks that you come to understand him.
01:58He's a passionate, desiring man.
02:01People think that Turner has lost his mind.
02:04They show his inner emotional world.
02:08It didn't matter what people said about him.
02:16It didn't matter about his background.
02:18He was an artist, and he had to fight to be a painter.
02:22Joseph Mallard William Turner, to give him his full name, was a Londoner.
02:49And he was quite an eccentric-looking character.
02:55I'm probably a funny-looking Londoner myself.
02:57But I got to know about him because I played him in a film called Mr. Turner, which was about his life.
03:05So, it feels very, very personal to me, because I really did have to think, what is going on in his head?
03:24Why is he like he is?
03:27He's driven, he's determined, he's incredibly private.
03:30Turner grows up in the heart of London, in Covent Garden, which is a fruit and veg market.
03:45So, it's a working area.
03:47But there's also quite a lot of prostitution, a lot of robberies.
03:57It's not a pleasant world.
04:00He sees life as it really is, real life.
04:03It's just outside his windows.
04:04And the harsh realities of that Georgian world, the filth, the threat, the danger, become part of Turner's life at an early age.
04:19Because disaster strikes his family.
04:22When Turner was eight, he lost his little sister, who was about five at the time,
04:27which I think really would have broken Turner's heart at an eight-year-old.
04:30He was very fond of his sister.
04:35Well, that's the moment everything would change, because Turner is sent away from home,
04:40and eventually goes to live with his relatives in Margate.
04:45And I think this first trip to Margate blew his mind.
04:50I think what Turner felt when he was in Margate was like being woken up, like being shook by nature.
05:07I live here.
05:08I look at the same thing that Turner looked at.
05:12Turner was part of my psyche, part of my DNA growing up in Margate.
05:17It was something to feel proud of, because Turner came here.
05:29I think something hit him in the eyeballs.
05:34You've got this reflective light that comes from the sea.
05:37Instinctively, he grabs his sketchbook.
05:49Some of Turner's first surviving works are of Margate.
05:55That early work of the harbour is incredibly accomplished for his age.
06:01Because at this point, he is largely self-taught.
06:09I just image him as a child, drawing, drawing constantly, anything he could get older.
06:15That was a kind of prodigy quality.
06:19Once I started looking at his sketchbooks, the whole world opened up to me about his work and character.
06:26As an analyst, I look at the art people create and figure out what is going on with them.
06:35I think Turner is working very hard to try to make sense of the world.
06:42And it doesn't surprise me that he's drawing buildings.
06:46What he needs to stabilise himself is something, a structure he can touch, something that has a shape.
06:56Because there was a lot of scary things happening at a tender age.
07:04The Turner's were struggling with another great sadness.
07:13The secret one.
07:16Turner's mother, Mary, it's possible that she had some kind of bipolar, some kind of schizophrenia, some psychotic disorder.
07:28His mother is prone to dangerous temper tantrums and storms.
07:38It's a very vulnerable position to be in as a child if you have a parent who's not well.
07:43It paints your world as an unpredictable, unsafe world, a world in which you have little power.
07:56There's a lot of guilt and shame attached to mental illness.
08:02It was a taboo.
08:03Because of his mother's illness and his father, William, really emotionally took care of him.
08:17His dad was a barber.
08:25He had his pictures up on display in his shop.
08:28And just a stone's throw from his father's barber shop is the Warne Academy, based at Somerset House, which is the centre of the art world.
08:40And this is Turner's ambition, really, from very early on, that he wants to be part of that.
08:44The Royal Academy is about creating excellence that simply didn't exist in art beforehand in the country.
08:59Artists from the Royal Academy visited the barber shop.
09:02They were so impressed by Turner's art that they'd get him enrolled into Royal Academy drawing school.
09:11He's just 14.
09:14He probably was the youngest person ever to get a place as a student at the Royal Academy.
09:24He was an upstart from the wrong side of the tracks.
09:28And this is an elite and exclusive institution.
09:32So Turner is very much plunged into a brand new world.
09:41The art establishment, it used to have a class issue.
09:47Art was for the wealthy.
09:52Turner had a really strong working class accent.
09:58And when I was at the Royal College of Art, someone said,
10:01it's not her I'm against so much, but it's every time she opens her mouth, it's so shrill.
10:06And there's one thing I'm not, it's shrill.
10:10So God knows what Turner was going through at that time.
10:14It must have been horrific.
10:16When you see his early drawings, he's instinctively just drawn to constantly looking at the structure of things.
10:30He's trying to affect the skill.
10:38Turner's watercolours are meticulous in the extreme.
10:40His keenness for detail is exceptional.
10:48Every stone, every brick, every window has to be in place.
10:54He was hyper-focused.
11:00Hyper-focus is a term that we use politely now to describe people who have obsessive characteristics.
11:06I'm a neurodiverse person, and part of my character is that I'm obsessive.
11:15I will focus on one thing.
11:19The rest of the world ceases to exist.
11:26Clearly, Turner has that obsessive eye for detail that maybe speaks to his potential neurodiversity.
11:35There are hundreds of sketches and watercolours.
11:42I mean, to say that Turner's driven is an understatement of enormous magnitude.
11:49Because he wants to succeed.
11:52He wants to be an outstanding artist.
11:55But to really make it in the art world, Turner needs more than talent and skill.
12:09You have to be seen as a gentleman.
12:13But if you have the wrong type of reputation, you would be finished.
12:17And Turner knows it.
12:19Turner can't afford to put a foot wrong.
12:21But he had a secret.
12:26And his dark secret was his mother.
12:30The mother's condition was getting worse and worse and worse.
12:34And he's always living in fear of this woman doing something that would tarnish his reputation.
12:42There was such an assumption at the time, if the mother is mad, the child will be mad.
12:56And he cannot afford for people to look at him in that light.
13:01So when he's desperately attempting to make it as an artist, he starts making plans to put her into a mental hospital, St. Luke's.
13:12People didn't know what to do with mentally ill patients.
13:19There were no medications at the time.
13:23And they were kind of tortured, not out of cruelty, but out of ignorance.
13:28So to institutionalize someone at the time is basically to condemn them to kind of a prison.
13:38And they would be chained up, put in solitary confinement.
13:42This was really quite a hellish environment.
13:47Once she's admitted, Turner and his father will never visit Mary Turner.
13:52He never sketched her.
14:00He never, ever liked to hear about her at all.
14:07To live with banishing your own mother, that's a heavy burden of guilt and misery and loss and sorrow.
14:19And his way of coping with that is by painting.
14:30Because of his family background, there's always the drive about working.
14:35What am I going to do for a living?
14:37How am I going to not end up in the workhouse, in the pauper's grave?
14:42I think he could see this talent and knew that he could make money out of this.
14:49If he can just become a member of the Royal Academy, he can call himself Esquire.
14:56He can command higher prices and he can develop the artistic independence he's desperate to have.
15:02What the Royal Academy is about is lifting painters out of the position of being menial craftsmen to being intellectuals.
15:15And you can only be an intellectual if you are able to grasp history painting.
15:22Scenes from the Bible, myths and legends.
15:26This was seen as the highest form of painting at the Royal Academy.
15:32If you could paint history painting, that was it, you've arrived.
15:39So Turner leaves London.
15:42He's looking for landscapes he can use that are visually powerful.
15:46He goes to very romantic places in the wilds of Wales.
16:08Looking for the most fantastic places to make pictures.
16:13And there's one particular location he's continually drawn to.
16:21Dolbad Arran.
16:30This is the famous Welsh castle where a medieval prince is said to have been imprisoned by his brother.
16:36In the sketchbooks, you see him stalking his prey almost.
16:46Turner goes back to the same place time and time again.
16:52And he produces sketch after sketch after sketch.
16:57And then he changes the media.
17:00And he'll go from watercolour to pastels.
17:06He wants to explore how that can communicate the same thing, but in a different way.
17:12He's constantly experimenting, restlessly experimenting.
17:16And I love that. I absolutely love that.
17:23I've been inspired by Turner in my painting.
17:26And throughout my musical career, I've always taken my art materials on the road with me.
17:34Done a little sketch here.
17:35A bit like a song.
17:36You have a sketch of a melody and then you take it into the studio and embroider on it and develop the song until you have a final mix of the final song.
17:48And his work shows that drive and inspiration.
17:52Drama is at the heart of everything that he did.
18:09When I first saw his work, Turner was the figure who most spoke to me about what I thought image making should be about.
18:19This is a painting in which you can already see one of the key elements of his work, which is this way in which light and shadow are used to direct your attention towards the story.
18:38You see in the foreground, a very, very small image of a man naked from the waist up, his face obscured as he leans over that Turner referred to as hopeless Owen.
19:04He is the prince intended for captivity in the castle.
19:08It seems to me that whatever he is painting, he is telling something about his own life.
19:18What strikes me about this very intense and melancholic painting is how the humans are far down below, dwarfed by the aloofness of this faraway castle.
19:38That's almost already away in heaven.
19:43And for me, it evoked this sense of this terrible gulf between Turner and this faraway hospitalized mother who's not reachable.
19:56It seems full of grief, this painting, terrible grief.
20:01Turner's historical paintings help get him noticed by the members of the Royal Academy, the elite group of people who control the art world.
20:23In 1799, there's a chance for him to be voted in by the existing members.
20:33But it is nerve-wracking because it's a viper's nest.
20:42There's 18 different people casting votes.
20:44Ten of them vote for Turner.
20:53It's tight, but it's enough.
20:54He is through.
20:56At the age of 24 years old, he is now an associate member of the Royal Academy.
21:05The youngest person ever to be voted in.
21:09Despite their reservations about Turner, they can't deny that it is great work.
21:15They just don't understand how somebody who is not a gentleman can do work like this, but they still have to acknowledge it.
21:30It must have felt like a massive moment for him to say, right, I'm in for it, I've got it.
21:36And they moved to Harley Street.
21:38Turner was doing so well, his dad now works as his assistant.
21:53And to mark his success, he paints a self-portrait.
21:56And what's telling is he now wears the attire of a gentleman.
22:09It is him staring absolutely at himself, saying, I'm 25, I'm somebody who has arrived.
22:20You've got this vulnerability and you have this shyness.
22:25It's not necessarily the most flattering of portraits, but he has the ability to look unflinchingly, even at himself.
22:46He is going to paint, draw, sketch what he sees, whatever the consequences.
22:56The buildings are going up.
23:17The chimneys are going up.
23:19The coal is being dug.
23:24The colour, the shape, the smell of the landscapes that he loves is changing very, very rapidly.
23:34Well, his sketchbook seemed to tell a different story.
23:36His focus in this period is the natural world.
23:44Perhaps a world he already senses is being lost.
23:53Turner is part of the Romantic movement.
23:56A group of artists who were saying, hold on, nature is something to be revered.
24:02So he travels overseas.
24:11He's bold, he's brave.
24:14His eyes are opened to landscapes that he could not have foreseen.
24:18He's thinking, I'm going to go and look at stuff and experience stuff that people have only ever heard of in their dreams.
24:28When he gets to the Alps, he would have been on his knees with exhaustion, clambering up to those peaks.
24:44And when he stands there, before this vast landscape of jagged peaks and ice, he's looking at something which, frankly, even by his measure, was beyond comprehension.
24:59And I'm just making the hairs on the back of my neck stand on it now.
25:06Imagine what it did to him.
25:12He sees these amazing vistas and he's sketching, sketching.
25:18And he's thinking, what is this?
25:20What do I see?
25:21What are the elements?
25:22Why am I fascinated with this?
25:24And he fills three whole sketchbooks with images.
25:40He's enthralled by that rawness of nature.
25:45It's uncontrollability.
25:47It's supreme power.
25:49And before it, our imperceptible nothingness.
25:54And this defined the sublime for him.
26:01The idea is that the power of nature is terrifying beyond comprehension.
26:07And truly, truly beautiful as well.
26:10When he gets back in his studio, he's trying to express something that he felt at the time, the astounding sublimity of these mountains.
26:33He's never done it before.
26:42Or he thinks, what if I do this?
26:43I'm going to try this.
26:44Shit, did that work?
26:46I'll use that.
26:46I'll spit on it.
26:47I'm not supposed to use this because I don't care because I want to get the feeling.
26:51Turner didn't hold himself back.
26:58He expressed himself with his work.
27:03I use my energy and my life force to make the paintings.
27:07And Turner did that as well.
27:08I'm not saying I'm anything like Turner.
27:09But I'm just saying where the essence comes from that pushes you to be an artist.
27:15I think Turner was like totally in tune with all of that.
27:20The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen is an incredible, powerful painting.
27:44We feel that water cascading down.
27:50He's trying to show the actual force of water in paint.
28:00When I look at this work in particular, it's the epitome of drama.
28:05You know, it's very dramatic.
28:08The swirling, the action, the movement of the paint, the thickness of the paint is amazing.
28:16He's just used that oil paint itself to express turbulence and unrest.
28:23The people themselves don't matter.
28:36They're just caught up in this extraordinary force of nature.
28:40It's about trying to get people to understand our place in the universe.
28:45He paints an avalanche where there's no sign of a human except for a tiny hut so you get the sense of scale.
29:04You get also a sense of sound in that painting.
29:11You can almost hear the kind of boom of that moment of natural disaster.
29:16That's what the sublime should do.
29:22It should terrify you a bit.
29:24And Turner gives expression to that.
29:29His paintings are not photographically perfect, but they give you a perfect impression of a feeling.
29:35People flock to see Turner's art.
29:49Paintings in galleries at that time would have been enormously powerful because they were communicating to people what they simply couldn't see.
30:00How many people travelled in those days?
30:02No one. You never went anywhere.
30:04So the artist was providing us with literally a window on the rest of the world.
30:14When Turner shows his work inspired by his trip to Switzerland, the critics are in uproar.
30:21The most vocal of all the critics is Sir George Beaumont.
30:26George Beaumont was a major patron of the arts and a tastemaker.
30:30He decided what was good art and what was bad art.
30:38What he doesn't like is that there's an impreciseness in Turner's painting.
30:42Where is the land?
30:44Where is the land?
30:48Where is the sky?
30:51They seem to merge into each other.
30:54And if you can't see where anything begins or ends, how can it be a great painting?
31:03We see Sir George Beaumont desperately trying to discredit Turner.
31:08And he refers to Turner as the artist who has misled the taste of the entire nation.
31:15Turner cared deeply about what the critics thought of him.
31:25We know this because in his sketchbooks he copied out reviews.
31:29And Beaumont's negative criticism not only upset Turner, it had an impact on sales.
31:43There is a sense of looming crisis.
31:45He's concerned that some of his patrons might actually fall away.
31:49He's using his sketchbooks as notebooks and there's one in particular in which he's working out his finances.
32:03Like anyone from a working class background, including myself, he's looking at everything that comes in and out in a way that somebody from a different class doesn't need to.
32:12When we look at his books, he's got a list of about 12 paintings that haven't been sold.
32:20We see these figures that seem to be much higher.
32:24And then the new prices of the paintings.
32:27He's downpriced in some of his pictures, the ones that haven't sold.
32:31He's having to cut his losses.
32:33He needs to make some money and therefore he's got to shift them.
32:42And Turner's problems are only getting worse.
32:49For 10 years he'd been in a relationship and now has two illegitimate daughters.
32:55We don't know what went on in that relationship.
33:00And when this relationship obviously fought us, he can't acknowledge it.
33:06He won't.
33:12But Turner's private world surfaces in his sketchbooks.
33:18They're full of erotic material, which was thought to have been destroyed.
33:25From his drawings, we know he's obviously a passionate human being.
33:29Not only passionate, but he's like erotically preoccupied.
33:33I think he was painting brothel scenes every night in a pub in London.
33:42He was painting prostitutes doing cunnilingus.
33:46He was painting lesbian orgies.
33:52And I think he probably used prostitutes as models.
33:55What struck me about those drawings was he's often focusing on very particular areas.
34:11Especially the sexual organs, the act of intercourse.
34:16It's a little bit like porn.
34:19It's very fragmented.
34:22It's not about whole human beings.
34:27That's why people go to prostitutes as opposed to have relationships.
34:32It's the way porn functions.
34:33It's not fully developed.
34:39His early concepts of what it means to connect to another human being
34:45are frightening and possibly damaged.
34:49And that maybe it's better not to get too attached.
34:55Because it's too risky.
34:58So his art and what is under his control,
35:01that is what he's devoted to.
35:03And everyone else is going to remain to some degree on the periphery.
35:07That's the safest.
35:15I think his work was always going to be first and foremost in his life.
35:21Always.
35:22I think anything was going to be secondary to it.
35:27He has a compulsion to be a success.
35:29After taking a hit in sales,
35:43now Turner needs to paint pictures that will appeal to his patrons.
35:48The latest fashion in art is for realistic paintings of everyday life.
35:52Turner's sketchbooks now show him grappling with this new subject.
36:08He's studying from reality.
36:11He's getting out there and he wants to see ordinary lives unfolding
36:15in the landscapes he's drawing across Britain.
36:22Back in the studio,
36:25Turner throws himself into another great work of art.
36:36Turner saw this scene while he was travelling through Yorkshire.
36:40That's even his stagecoach arriving in the distance.
36:46You can see there's a man with a hunting rifle.
36:49And it clearly looks like this chap's a gamekeeper.
36:52And the girl next to him has got this animal around her neck.
36:55And it seems to be a hare.
36:58It's a frosty morning and it's keeping her warm.
37:03So these are working people.
37:05And it's a working situation in the countryside.
37:11This is a painting of observation.
37:14You feel the truth, the subjective truth of this image.
37:17You shiver with the cold almost.
37:19Frosty morning is a response to those critics who say that his paintings are imprecise.
37:31He's proving that he can be precise when he wants to.
37:35He's showing how beautifully, how perfectly he could render a real scene.
37:43And frosty morning is hailed as a masterpiece.
37:47It's made all the critics applaud.
37:49They say that everything is just as perfectly as in nature.
37:58Over the next decade and a half, Turner is celebrated as Britain's leading painter.
38:14His sketches show him living the high life among his rich patrons as he spends time in country houses like Petworth in Sussex.
38:22He has lots of commissions from aristocrats, from wealthy people.
38:31We have this image of Turner as this quiet, taciturn man.
38:35In fact, Turner was very good at charming people.
38:38But even though the great and good accept him into their world, my sense is the only person who really knew him was his old dad.
38:51He was a constant.
38:53He was his champion.
38:55He was his rock and his thing to go home to.
38:59I think it meant the earth to him.
39:00But when Turner is 54, his old dad sadly dies.
39:20Turner is deeply, deeply cut up by his father's death.
39:27He was heartbroken.
39:30I think it meant the earth to him.
39:34He did kind of have a bit of a breakdown afterwards.
39:39And for him, the natural thing to do is pour his grief onto the canvas in the most extraordinary way.
39:54Death on a Pale Horse is a real memento mori.
39:58This idea of the transience of life, that death comes to us all.
40:04The horse is emerging out of the shadows, carrying themselves of skeletal form.
40:10Poised right on the edge of life and death, life is fading, life is disappearing.
40:20He's describing his inner emotional world.
40:27His father, the only stable, sane person in his life, died.
40:34That's a lot to bear.
40:37He's painting what death, loss and grief are.
40:49It's gruesome, it's horrific, it's overwhelmingly terrible.
41:01Turner never finished this work, but he keeps it in his studio.
41:05And he never shows it in public.
41:09After his father's death, he was drawn back to Margate.
41:23He was drawn back to Margate.
41:28To rest and to experience that light.
41:33I think he felt more private here.
41:35He liked his quieter time in Margate.
41:38He stays in this boarding house, right on the front, because it would have a beautiful view.
41:49And there he finds this woman, called a Sophia Booth.
41:55She was a widow and she ran the boarding house.
41:59So he's there, finding love, and he sketches her.
42:03She, perhaps, was the only person he was close to, who he drew.
42:11He also embarks on an extraordinary series of sketchbooks.
42:15A sort of diary of this new love affair.
42:27I mean, they're really so free and so wild.
42:33So, but they're pretty incredible.
42:39And this one that I'm looking at now, with the legs raised up, it's so erotic.
42:43There's this sweeping, beautiful, red brush mark.
42:48And it's, like, totally emotional.
42:51Really evocative.
42:52These sketches show people connected, wrapping each other, legs entwined with each other.
43:05And in many of them, it's not just intercourse.
43:09The humans are full figure.
43:11They're not parts.
43:14They're actually relating to each other.
43:17They're close.
43:18I would like to imagine that he developed the capacity to trust and connect to another person.
43:30And maybe he had to wait for his father to die to do that.
43:35To be free of his past and to actually connect to a real human being.
43:43So contemporary-looking.
43:50They could have been drawn or painted last week.
43:54He's painting freely with his emotion.
43:57And also, when you look at Turner's seascapes of that time, a lot of them are full of, like, this sort of fecundity and these turning waves.
44:09And this sort of, like, it's like a giant cloud of spunk being thrown across the Stanford.
44:14It's really gestural and guttural, and it's, like, totally emotional.
44:28But then there's these soft, tiny little watercolours that just have a splash of blue and a splash of yellow.
44:38And just one top of white, and you know it's the last of the sun going down.
44:44When you look at the colours, it's almost abstract.
44:51He was on a journey of doing something completely new that no one else had done before.
44:59Because he's trying to understand how little you need to represent something.
45:05There is a kind of economy, a kind of minimalism in the sketches that will become one of the key elements of his work.
45:18At the next Royal Academy show, Turner unveils seven paintings in his new experimental style.
45:32They're unlike anything he's exhibited before.
45:34In Slave Ship, he paints a flaming blood-red sky to help highlight a horrifying story from Britain's recent past.
45:57Colour draws us in, really rich and sublime, and that's the beauty of the painting.
46:09And you have to really look at it for a while before you suddenly realise that it's not all about beauty.
46:14There's something that's going on that's quite horrible.
46:16What we're looking at, in fact, are people drowning in the foreground.
46:26These are slaves' arms reaching up above the waves,
46:31trying to keep these manacles out of the water that are going to pull them to the bottom of the ocean.
46:38This image by Turner is about the great Zong disaster that happened in 1781.
46:46At least 150 of the slaves were thrown overboard, men, women, and children,
46:53so they could claim insurance.
46:59And the best way to make sure that they would drown was to leave their chains on.
47:06He's painting the absolute turmoil of the ship caught spilling its cargo of humans.
47:16And that caught me.
47:17I was very moved by this.
47:20And he's painted his own emotion into these works.
47:27Slavery has been abolished in England, but slavery is not abolished in other places around the world.
47:32So it's still a live issue.
47:34I think Turner is saying in this painting, this is all about man's inhumanity to man.
47:41It reminds them of how, in the end, they are all complicit in what happened in the past.
47:48And Turner brings it back.
47:50And of course, it remains a relevant painting even today.
47:53Once again, the critics are horrified by Turner's work.
48:02They are stirred up, distressed by this new way of seeing.
48:08The reviews are brutal.
48:09One reviewer asks,
48:13Is the painting sublime or ridiculous?
48:15I don't know which.
48:18When it comes to the other six paintings Turner has on display,
48:22there is tremendous mockery.
48:26One critic says that his paintings look like omelettes.
48:31Another critic makes the jibe that this is chronomania.
48:35Cooler's just taken far too far.
48:37People think that Turner has lost his mind.
48:43He's lost his way.
48:46He's lost within his own work.
48:51After this, Turner is not taken seriously.
48:53Turner fought very hard to be part of the establishment.
49:11But now he's reached his mid-60s,
49:13and he starts to realise they're never really going to accept him.
49:17They will always find a way to lambast him.
49:21He's a gruff, working-class person.
49:23When he starts to paint these paintings that move towards abstraction,
49:28it sort of proves their point that he wasn't a gentleman painter after all,
49:33because look at this stuff that he's painting.
49:37And he eventually sort of goes into hiding.
49:40What he wants to do is just be anonymous,
49:45just be out there sketching and painting the elements.
49:52Fire, air, wind, water,
49:57the things that underpin all life.
49:59His desire to engage with the sublime,
50:06the raw power of nature,
50:08is his mission as an artist.
50:10Then he pushes it further and further.
50:16He purported to have been lashed to the mast
50:18so that he could experience the sublime power of nature.
50:23What he's trying to say is that I want to be totally involved in my subject
50:30so that I can give it to you with absolute purity and veracity.
50:36Snowstorm is my favourite turn up by a long way.
50:48There's no detail left.
50:51All of that meticulous work is gone.
50:54There's no gap between the sea and the sky.
50:56They meld into one tumult of energy
50:59with this chip being tossed in the middle of it
51:04with a bent mast.
51:06Everything about that is saying that at any point,
51:10this craft can be lost,
51:12can be destroyed by the enormous power and energy of nature.
51:17And you're sucked into that vortex.
51:22You're being pulled into that painting.
51:26All hell is breaking loose.
51:29There are almost like demonic forces at play here.
51:33I saw like the sea and the winds and the clouds
51:39and the forces of nature as the forces of the unconscious.
51:43The early relationship with one's mother never leaves.
51:49Is he finally like strong enough to actually look at his mother's madness?
51:56Or is he engulfed by it?
51:59And at the centre of the painting is a funnel of smoke.
52:06It's a sign of the Industrial Revolution,
52:09which is having an impact on nature in completely unforeseen ways.
52:14What starts off as, you know, relatively innocent, you know,
52:20plumes of smoke turn into full-on smog.
52:27Now, at the age of 69,
52:29Turner is depicting these changes in his sketches and paintings.
52:33These particles are in the air,
52:39thrown up by industrial works.
52:42And all of that adds to this new kind of atmosphere.
52:47And what Turner is trying to capture
52:49is a new kind of light.
52:52And he puts this sensation into his next great oil painting.
53:05This is Turner catching the frenzy of that moment.
53:11He suddenly realises that for the key drama of this,
53:16less detail is even more important.
53:22What you're left with is almost like a white canvas
53:26of whites and greys and blacks.
53:33With so little information,
53:36you're forced to then concentrate on the key drama of the piece,
53:41which is a steam train full speed ahead,
53:46you know, balloon smoke everywhere.
53:48And it's an incredibly powerful symbol,
53:52which now we will understand for eternity.
53:58This snapshot of the Industrial Revolution
54:01will live forever.
54:03And on the front of the train,
54:09there are, like, all red spots.
54:10I mean, they shouldn't be there.
54:11Obviously, the front of the train would have been solid.
54:13So he's added those
54:14because he's telling us what's inside that train.
54:19You know, the burning coal
54:20are coming out of its funnel
54:22into the world with increasing rapidity,
54:25and that world is changing.
54:26This is where we start to brutalise nature.
54:35What was his final mission with those paintings?
54:39Was he saying, progress at your peril?
54:42It's almost like a storm was coming
54:47and he caught the beginnings of it.
54:53Now that we're in the middle of it,
54:55we can see it all.
54:57There is this visionary,
55:00prophetic quality to the work.
55:02There are no other painters
55:07doing what Turner's doing in that period.
55:10His work seems to be from another era,
55:13an era that is, in fact, in the future.
55:22Turner continues to exhibit his work
55:24at the Royal Academy,
55:25but he's rarely seen in public.
55:29Nobody quite knew where he was.
55:32He lived secretly with his companion,
55:37Sophia Booth, at a house in Chelsea.
55:44So he had this world
55:46where he was living beautifully
55:48and in love with this woman.
55:52He was doing his most expressive,
55:54impressionist work,
55:56where people say he'd gone mad.
55:58Because people couldn't work out
56:02what he was doing.
56:06But he didn't have to prove anything anymore.
56:10And in his last sketchbook,
56:12you can see he's developed
56:14his own unique visual language.
56:17He was a true artist.
56:23He didn't care about class or society.
56:26He was free.
56:27He was free.
56:27At this stage in his life,
56:39what is important for Turner
56:40is his legacy.
56:43Will he be recognised at last
56:46for being the great painter he is?
56:49Turner wants his paintings
56:50to be in a public collection.
56:52So the public
56:54will see the work
56:56and understand him.
56:58He doesn't trust the critics.
57:04He put his life and soul
57:07into these paintings.
57:08They all meant a lot to him.
57:16I mean, later on in life,
57:17he tried to buy them all back.
57:19And he wanted to leave them
57:20to the nation.
57:23Because he's saying,
57:24this is me.
57:25This is all I can say
57:26about myself.
57:28This is what I did.
57:29And this is what I dedicated myself to.
57:33And these are me.
57:35These paintings are me.
57:37This is what I wanted to do.
57:39And this is what I wanted to do.
57:40And this is what I wanted to do.
57:41And this is what I wanted to do.
57:42And this is what I wanted to do.
57:43And this is what I wanted to do.
57:44And this is what I wanted to do.
57:45And this is what I wanted to do.
57:46And this is what I wanted to do.
57:47And this is what I wanted to do.
57:48And this is what I wanted to do.
57:49And this is what I wanted to do.
57:50And this is what I wanted to do.
57:51And this is what I wanted to do.
57:52And this is what I wanted to do.
57:53And this is what I wanted to do.
57:54And this is what I wanted to do.
57:55And this is what I wanted to do.
57:56And this is what I wanted to do.
57:57And this is what I wanted to do.
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