The best new exhibitions you'd be mad to miss this week
He painted apocalyptic storms, history-defining battles and death-defying whale hunts, but Joseph Mallord William Turner wasn’t from nautical stock; he was the son of a Covent Garden wigmaker. It wasn’t unusual in the eighteenth century for an artist to have such a humble beginning. ‘You get Turner, you get Hogarth, you get William Blake, all London boys, all coming from modest backgrounds, who are literally having to earn their keep,’ explains Christine Riding, head of arts at the National Maritime Museum, where the first full-scale exhibition dedicated to Turner’s fascination with the sea opens this month.
'His talent for drawing and painting was nurtured on the muddy banks of the Thames'
Born in 1775, Turner was shipped off to relatives at a young age following a ‘fit of illness’ in the family that would eventually see his mother committed to the Bedlam ‘lunatic asylum’. His talent for drawing and painting was nurtured on the muddy banks of the Thames in Brentford and, later, in Margate where he lodged with an uncle. Turner’s father showed off his early efforts in his Maiden Lane barber shop, boasting that one day his son would become a painter.
At the National Maritime Museum visitors are instantly plunged into a painterly maelstrom courtesy of a trio of early masterpieces, ‘Calais Pier’ (1803), ‘The Shipwreck’ (1805) and ‘The Wreck of a Transport Ship’ (1810), with which Turner made his name at the Royal Academy. What the show subsequently makes clear is that the talent surging through these spectacular works is equalled by a shrewd business sense. ‘Turner moved very quickly from promising newcomer to being the most important artistic talent of his generation,’ explains Riding. ‘And he did so by positioning himself as a sea painter. He didn’t have a private income that was going to allow him to experiment. He had to respond to a market.’
Turner blows his contemporaries out of the water with paintings such as ‘Fishermen at Sea’ (1796), the surprisingly small but characteristically intense canvas that marked his entrance to the Academy. Here, he claims a place for himself and announces what would become his ‘trademark’ of depicting warm light (the fishermen’s lantern) and cool (the moon) in the same painting. Few viewers at the time would have mistaken ‘Fishermen at Sea’ for a simple depiction of seafaring. As Riding says, ‘In British art nothing is ever just a coastal scene because the sea is a very powerful symbol. It’s absolutely understood that the storm-tossed ship is an emblem of society.’
His most famous painting, ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ (1839), depicts the gunship, a veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar, being towed by paddle steamer to its final berth in Rotherhithe to be broken up for scrap. But Turner understood that heartstrings could be tugged in the smallest sketch as well as the grandest production. By the time ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ was exhibited, Turner was at the height of his career. Thanks in part to widely distributed prints made after his paintings he was also famous and wealthy (he had his own gallery made in his Harley Street home). Yet, adventurous to the end, he set about making paintings that are truly revolutionary. Like the four pages from ‘The Whaler Sketchbook’ (1844-45), on show at the National Maritime Museum, in which he conjures the terrifying immensity of the open sea in a few cursory strokes.
'Turner was quite wily'
In later life Turner was said to resemble an old sea captain. Despite his rise in society, he never lost his Cockney accent and when he died his fellow Academicians were shocked to discover he had led a secret life with a mistress in Chelsea, where he was known as Admiral Puggy Booth.
The most famous anecdote associated with the artist is that, in order to become a better painter, he had himself lashed to the mast of a ship during a storm. ‘Turner travelled extensively and experienced storms, but it’s unlikely,’ says Riding, referring to ‘Snow Storm – Sea Storm off a Harbour’s Mouth’ (1842) around which the story grew. ‘Turner would have been almost 70 at the time. But he was quite wily. He would certainly appreciate the power of that kind of myth around an artist’s work. It’s almost like a martyrdom, almost otherworldly.’ As this epic show makes clear, the myth entirely befits an artist whose paintings come closer to the sublime than anything in British art before or since.
