No one took greater imaginative leaps and risks than Turner – he's Britain's greatest artist

Independent

13-04-2025

Anyone wanting to understand why Joseph Mallord William Turner is Britain's greatest artist need look no further than his extraordinary 1842 painting Snow Storm – Steam-Boat Off a Harbour's Mouth, on permanent show at Tate Britain. With its trail of red-tinged smoke streaming from the perilously listing ship, and surging sea captured in a spiralling vortex of paint marks that seem to pull us bodily into the tumult, this is a patently revolutionary painting. And it's one that embodies key tropes of national identity. There's the old chestnut, of course, about the British being an island race whose fortunes are inescapably bound up with the sea; and, even more significantly, there's our treasured sense of ourselves as a people who are keener than most to get physically out into nature.
Not content to watch the storm from the safety of the spray-drenched harbour wall at Harwich on the Essex coast, the 66-year-old Turner claimed that he had persuaded the sailors to 'lash me to the mast to observe it for four hours'. We can picture Turner himself on the fragile craft, tethered sodden to the mast, sketchbook in hand, recording the terrifying pitching of the vessel from the viewer's imagined perspective.
And on hearing that the painting had been written off by critics as mere 'soapsuds and whitewash', Turner responded bitterly, 'I wonder what they think the sea is like! I wish they'd been in it! I did not paint it to be understood, but to show what such a scene is like.'
Turner is often referred to as a precursor and enabler of the Impressionists – as if an artist of his scale and ambition could be regarded as a mere adjunct to other people's achievements, however momentous. Yet the fact that he tends to be regarded even now as an artist who is somewhat between movements and moments is at least in part owing to his own personality.
Described by contemporaries as enigmatic and highly eccentric, Turner feels like a certain kind of Englishman writ large: a chippy, lower-middle-class Londoner, who refused to give up his cockney accent despite receiving every possible establishment accolade. Born in Covent Garden on 23 April 1775, the son of a barber and wigmaker, yet brought up mainly in Brentford and Margate, Turner was a child prodigy. He enrolled at the Royal Academy – Britain's premier art school – at the age of 14 and sold his first painting in the Summer Exhibition at 15. Despite an intensely competitive nature and early acceptance as one of Britain's leading artists, Turner remained at a distance from the mainstream art world. He didn't write any major treatises, create any theories – except what can palpably be deduced from looking at his paintings – nor did he found or join any movements.
Yet like all true Englishmen, Turner was obsessed with the weather. And what weather! From gigantic storms in the Alps to hyperreal early paintings of shipwrecks in which you can practically count the bubbles on the heaving mountains of foam, Turner's real subject isn't the structure of the land or even of the sea, but the atmospheric conditions through which they're perceived. Many of his later semi-abstract seascapes feel like visualisations of that great British cultural phenomenon, the shipping forecast, with forms dissolving into banks of vapour in which you can positively feel the build-up of atmospheric pressure.
Indeed, a few scenes in Sussex's Petworth House and some intimate drawings aside, I can barely think of a single interior in Turner's entire oeuvre. The sheer gusty outdoorsiness of his art makes other artists' evocation of the 'sublime' – that quintessential Romantic-era sense of the awe-inspiring power of nature – feel painfully polite and literary. He often puts me in mind of the kind of old-school male who would rather be in a tent, or better still a camper-van, than a five-star hotel.
The fact that Turner's art is generally in widescreen, with figures seen in the middle or far distance, might suggest a lack of interest in people or an inability to paint them. Yet he also produced a significant number of very personal drawings, set in bedrooms, clearly referring to his relationship with his housekeeper Sarah Danby, with whom he had two daughters; though they never married. The sense of Turner as an artist of vast distances is further complicated by minutely detailed watercolours of animals and birds, an exhibition of which opens at his former residence, Sandycombe Lodge in Twickenham, on 23 April to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth.
While Turner and his slightly younger rival John Constable are often described as having elevated the landscape to the level of 'history painting' – grand narrative images, considered the highest of the academic genres – they were substantially responsible for blowing such fusty, antiquated distinctions out of the water: in Turner's case, literally.
Where the typically saleable 18th-century landscape took an idealised, classically inspired approach to nature, inspired by the French 'father of landscape painting' Claude Lorrain – all golden evening light and tastefully positioned ruins – Constable painted his dad's Suffolk boatyard in overcast English daylight, to the consternation of critics. Turner, though he spent considerable amounts of time in Italy, always feels most himself on the stretch of English coast between Harwich and Margate, on the Thames and Stour estuaries, edging towards abstraction in close proximity to the local fishermen and sailors, for whom he had the greatest respect.
Yet he didn't reject the great masters of the past. Far from it. Early in his career, he created dramatic sunset views that were direct responses to Claude, and designed to be viewed 'in conversation' with the great Frenchman's works, as he stipulated in a posthumous bequest to the National Gallery. During the 1830s, he produced a series of technically spectacular Italian landscapes, aimed at wealthy collectors, which blur the boundaries of the historical and contemporary, reality and dream, using multiple perspective points, mind-bending angles and truly hallucinatory colour. Ancient Rome: Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus (1839), with its glowing citadel rising through a mass of hazy reflections, purports to recreate ancient Rome, though much in the scene is patently modern. And in case anyone failed to get the message that he was out to surpass anything attempted by Claude, one of his former idol's signature tropes, the umbrella pine, is prominently positioned throughout the series.
While Turner was widely regarded as a prickly recluse, he was happy to grandstand when it suited him. His practice of completing his paintings on the gallery wall during 'varnishing day' at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition (a still extant tradition whereby members can make small adjustments to their work prior to opening), came close to a form of proto-performance art. The resulting pre-publicity ensured large crowds gathered around his works when the show opened, but brought him into conflict with other artists, most notably with Constable, when large works by the two artists were hung side by side in 1831 and 1832. In the latter instance, Turner put a large red splotch in the middle of his relatively placid seascape Helvoetsluys to counter the impact of Constable's more imposing The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, causing the latter to remark, 'He has been here and fired a gun.'
Such incidents contributed to a rivalry in their reputations that continues to this day. While Constable is undoubtedly a sublime artist, his vision was intensely localised, notably around Suffolk and Hampstead, as he would have been the first to admit. Turner was simply a much bigger and broader figure, who took far greater imaginative leaps and risks. His The Field of Waterloo (1818), with its nocturnal view of the jumbled corpses of French and British soldiers, is an anti-war painting created a good century before that idea came into general currency. The Slave Ship (1840), originally titled Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On, is a horrific anti-slavery painting (though Turner has earned posthumous criticism for investing in a scheme involving enslaved plantation workers).
Rain, Steam and Speed – the Great Western Railway (1844), with its locomotive hurtling towards the viewer across Maidenhead Railway Bridge, is perhaps the first incarnation of the 'industrial sublime', in which the wonders of nature merge with those of advanced technology – created decades before the Impressionists supposedly turned art on its head by embracing 'modern life'.
Turner's relationship with Impressionism is in fact complicated. While leading Impressionists Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro spent much time studying Turner's paintings while in exile in London during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), Pissarro later claimed that Turner hadn't understood colour, because he had 'used black' (which doesn't reflect light). The French painter clearly hadn't seen late Turner works such as the transcendent Norham Castle, Sunrise (1845), in which the Northumberland castle and surrounding countryside dissolve into fields of shimmering colour, without employing one iota of black.
Such works, never exhibited in the artist's lifetime, make it all too easy to empathise with Turner's famous last words, uttered as he was dying from cholera in 1851: 'The sun is God.' Britain's greatest artist may not have backed up his works with extensive written or verbal testimony, but he certainly understood the value of a good soundbite.