Why JMW Turner is still Britain's best artist, 250 years on

The Guardian

19-04-2025

He never crossed the Atlantic. Never sailed the Aegean. A cross-channel ferry was enough for Joseph Mallord William Turner to understand the might and majesty of the sea. His 1803 painting Calais Pier records his feelings on his first arrival in France as foaming green mountains of waves look as if they're about to sweep away the frail wooden jetty where passengers from England are expected to disembark. He is fascinated and appalled by the water, so solid in its power but always shifting, dissolving, sheering away.
If JMW Turner, born 250 years ago this spring, is Britain's greatest artist – and he is – it is partly because he is so intensely aware of a defining fact about his country: it's an island. For Turner, Britain is bordered by death, terror and adventure. Just one step from shore takes you into a world of peril. In the Iveagh Seapiece, fishers are hauling up their boats on a soaking beach while a wave like a wall surges towards them. One fishing boat is still out on the wild waters, so near to shore yet so far from safety.
Island artist though he is, Turner's imagination is the opposite of insular. It takes in lost civilisations and ancient myths, mountains he crossed and seas he never did. The wars that started with the French Revolution in 1789 had imprisoned Britain behind the Royal Navy's 'wooden walls'. When a short-lived peace broke out, the young landscape artist took his chance to travel, seeing a wine festival in Mâcon, gazing in awe at Mont Blanc – to judge from paintings he showed the next year. Before he ever saw the continent, he painted legendary Italy. All his life, he would keep up Europhile painterly pilgrimages to Venice and Rome, Heidelberg and the Saint Gotthard Pass.
Turner was born near Covent Garden, London, on 23 April 1775, in a Britain that seemed a much bigger place than it does now. Every distance was vaster, every road felt longer. It took several days to get from London to Chester, Newcastle or Exeter. There was terra incognita at the end of your lane. When the young Turner set out on sketching tours – to Wales in 1792, the north of England in 1797 – these were journeys in a mysterious land.
Touring Britain and Europe, returning with full sketchbooks, painting in his London studio – this was Turner's life. He showed such talent for art he was accepted into the Royal Academy Schools at 14. He never knew failure and once his career got going in the 1790s, never needed to fear poverty. He was an artistic mountain, a formidable mass of productivity, who left reams of drawings and watercolours and prints as well as oil paintings, much of it bequeathed to the nation when he died in 1851. But, outside his work, you can't really make much of Turner as a character. He slept with women but never married, built a house near the Thames, kept working, made a last home in Chelsea with his lover Sophia Booth, died there in view of the Thames. His soul is in his art.
It is also our soul. Turner shows us our land as a place of wonder and possibility. And he's not entirely making it up. In the golden yellow watercolour of Durham, painted around 1835, he has turned the cathedral with its twin Norman towers through 45 degrees to fit the view better and bestowed upon it the same honeyed sunlit radiance he might to a scene in Italy. But he also records the truth. On the bridge in the foreground are small figures that might be tired travellers looking for food, work, shelter who see the dazzling cathedral above them. That's his message. We may think we live in a crushed, unjust place and time but look up and see the light and you can be uplifted by sudden beauty, irradiated by hope.
His vision of a world torn between tragedy and possibility stretches from everyday observation to bloody myth. In his 1811 painting Apollo and Python, the Greek god of light and reason has just killed a scaly monster embodying the irrational. But it's an empty victory, for we glimpse other serpentine horrors still lurking in the tangled woody landscape. In his greatest single image of myth, Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus: Homer's Odyssey, an incandescent, smoky seascape off the coast of Sicily is the setting as the one-eyed giant cyclops rages atop Etna and the Greek hero and his crew laughingly escape the blinded monster. But the flaming sky is a false promise of freedom. Polyphemus calls on his father, Neptune, for vengeance: the sea god will wipe out Ulysses' men and delay his homecoming.
How did Turner become so familiar with the classics? It's tempting to see him as a working-class hero but he did not stand outside elite culture. He grew up at a time when the commercial competition and artistic daring of Hogarth, Gainsborough, Stubbs and Wright had made British art come alive. As a pupil at the Royal Academy schools, he was expected to draw from plaster casts of classical art as well as absorb the erudite references of contemporary artists such as Richard Wilson and Joshua Reynolds. Art was Turner's education in an age of educated art.
His age was also the Romantic age, when nature was embraced like a religion. Turner started showing at the Royal Academy's annual shows in the 1790s, when poets were experimenting with folk forms and hymning nature's joys. Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads in 1798 which included The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey. Turner's early art consciously aligns itself with the Romantic generation. In the same year that the Lakeside Poets broke through, he cunningly showed his view Morning Amongst the Coniston Fells.
As a conscious Romantic he subscribed to theories of the picturesque and sublime and reckoned what he was doing was a kind of poetry. Landscape art had developed in the 17th century but was given new meaning in the Romantic age as nature became the bearer of intense ideals, when there was an equation of inner and outer states. Even music depicted landscape in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.
Turner didn't identify with the humble voice of a Wordsworth. His hero was Lord Byron, the most aristocratic, 'immoral', cynically observant, internationalist and political of Romantics. He even wrote his own Byronic poem, The Fallacies of Hope. He would travel to Venice and other Italian cities in emulation of Byron's Childe Harold, aiming for the same blend of travel reportage and polemic. His painting of the gory aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, a morass of slaughtered bodies under the light of a nocturnal flare, has an inscription quoting Byron's account of the scene: 'The earth is covered thick with other clay / Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent, / Rider and horse – friend, foe – in one red burial blent!' His identification with the poet shows the kind of artist he wanted to be: political and dangerous, an adventurer with a heart.
Turner is as much a painter of time as light. He can make you marvel at the antiquity of rocks and buildings, how they have endured. History as survival fills his paintings of Caernarfon Castle or the Roman Forum. Yet he can show you sudden destruction that in an instant wipes away unchanging centuries.
When the Houses of Parliament caught fire in 1834 he was on hand to paint the mass of red flame reflected in the Thames and the watching crowds, the centuries going up in smoke as the medieval heart of English government was destroyed. But do his paintings of this event mourn a disaster or rejoice in a new beginning? Two years previously the Great Reform Act had swept away much old rotten constitutional detritus. Turner may love the past but he thrills to change – even to the flames consuming the old order.
This ambivalent eye for history is why Turner's 250th birthday means so much. His dates have unusual significance. Born into a preindustrial world, he would live until 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition that celebrated Britain's Victorian industrial might. The French Revolution and the wars it unleashed overshadow his early art. But he also witnessed the Industrial Revolution and revelled in its new energies. Industry is never just a blight for Turner, more a release of natural forces (which, scientifically, is what it was). Steam rules the waves in Staffa, Fingal's Cave, which delights in the paradox that sightseers are taken to see an ancient natural wonder by a modern technological marvel, puffing its way through the waves.
The passing away of the old and the careless brightness of the future collide in his 1839 canvas The Fighting Temeraire. The world of Turner's youth is gone: one of its last relics, a ship of the line that fought at Trafalgar, is being towed to its last resting place on a Thames with shimmering bronzed waters to rival any of his mythic seas.
The Thames was the first stretch of water Turner saw. Its tidal reaches were surely where he first intuited the mystery of water, its instability. On it nothing is solid and there is no protector. Turner is supposed to have said in his dying hours, 'The Sun is God!' If so, the sea is the devil. Ever since it was unveiled in 1840, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (Typhoon Coming On) has been recognised as his supreme masterpiece. The wealthy father of Turner's critical champion, John Ruskin, bought it for his son. Ruskin revered the painting but could not live with it, and not just because of the human content. This is Turner's most harrowing sky, stained with bloody crimsons and purples, a vomitous natural wonder, its lurid light infecting the gas-green waves where monster fish swarm. Then there is that human content: legs and arms in the water, weighted by iron manacles and chains. It is not the sky and sea that are sick after all but the type of human society represented by the ship. Nature is not divine or cursed. But what of us?
Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1807 and most Victorians were content to congratulate themselves on this. Why rake up the past? It took the imagination of Turner to return to the true story of the Zong, a slave ship out of Liverpool whose crew murdered more than 130 enslaved Africans in 1781, and make this horror as immediate, undying – and British – as the Fighting Temeraire.
What is Turner's legacy? You could call him the Rembrandt of the sea, or the Leonardo of landscape – he has the universality and complexity of these artists. He loved to compete with the old masters, painting versions of Dutch sea-pieces and Claude's Italian scenes.
The occasional sniffy critic claims Constable is more honest and real, or sees Turner's prodigious output as bombastic and eccentric. But Turner knows what he is doing. He wants painting to simultaneously touch the soul, arouse the senses and challenge the mind with the most serious meditations on history, politics, even time and space. When the Hubble space telescope and now the James Webb telescope started sending back data, this was translated by Nasa into smoky, sublime images of deep space by which we now navigate our cosmos. What do these Romantic nebulae most resemble? Turner's paintings, of course.
Turner 250, a year-long festival of events, is running now at the Tate Britain, London; Turner Contemporary, Margate, and galleries around the UK.