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The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I paint extreme emotions': Rachel Jones on her riotously colourful paintings – and her obsession with mouths
Viewers may find Rachel Jones's paintings 'beautiful', but they should be warned: the artist herself doesn't love that word. 'In our culture, the idea of beauty sadly isn't discussed in a critical, rich way – it's much more reductive as a term,' says the 34 year old. 'I hope that when people describe the work as beautiful, it doesn't just stop there.' Her aim, she says, is to pull viewers in deeper, beyond the surface of the work. Despite her youth, Jones is already preparing to open a major retrospective. Her forthcoming show at Dulwich Picture Gallery will see her large-scale, gloriously colourful abstractions hung alongside works from the museum's collection. It will be Jones's first institutional solo show in the UK, and also the museum's first solo show of a contemporary artist in its main exhibition space. 'The opportunity I have to look at everything as a whole is incredible,' she says. 'It's not often that you get to do that at such an early stage in your career. It's a real gift and privilege to look back at what I've done in the last six years or so.' After graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in 2019, Jones was picked up by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, had a work acquired by the Tate, and was part of solo or group exhibitions at Chisenhale Gallery, the Hayward Gallery and the Hepworth Wakefield, as well as galleries and institutions around North America, Europe and Asia. In the past couple of years, though, she has slowed down. She is no longer represented by a gallery and has broadened her practice to include sound and performance as well as painting. 'It's good to learn those different ways of making and how they influence each other,' she says, telling me that sound practice has become more embedded in her day-to-day thinking. Her first big sound work, a short opera called Hey Maudie, was performed at St James's Piccadilly in 2023. She is now working on expanding it into a full-length opera. 'I also want to pour more energy into my karaoke performances,' she says, smiling. 'In my personal life, I love to sing karaoke whenever I can, but it's something I haven't been able to explore as much as I would like to in my work.' Jones's cosy studio in Ilford, east London, is stuffed with the accumulation of six years' work. 'Each series of paintings moves forward,' she says, 'but it's happening more drastically in the last year in ways that are quite surprising to me, but really exciting.' She frames such rapid change around learning: she is using colours she is less confident with to give herself a challenge, and pushing herself to be more comfortable using negative space in her paintings, where the canvas is left visible. She works on raw linen now, rather than cotton canvas, giving her works an earthier, organic texture and tone. 'Even if I don't fully understand what I'm doing, I know to trust my impulses,' she says. 'I can wrestle with the process more.' There is a sense of peeling back and then building from the ground up in Jones's attitude, and in the work itself. When young artists receive the kind of immediate acclaim and scrutiny that Jones did after art school, it can be hard to find the space to reflect. Jones has worked hard to cultivate that space, and her experience of quick fame has trained her to articulate her practice carefully. 'There's a huge desire for artists to embed their work in a narrative,' she says. 'I don't think that's as useful as people think it is.' As she tells me about the evolutions and experimentations in her latest work, for the Dulwich show and for a site-specific commission at the Courtauld Gallery opening in September, she talks almost entirely about formal elements, rather than storytelling: new ways she uses her medium of oil pastels or new intentions behind her mark-making, not her personal narrative. But there is also a bit of figuration in Jones's largely abstract practice. From the beginning of her career, she has worked with the motif of the mouth. Her earlier works, such as lick your teeth, they so clutch (2021), now in Tate's collection, are bright colour fields that use the outlines of teeth to frame form and colour. In the new work, the mouth has become a more defining form. 'There is a little bit more vulnerability in the way that I'm using the mouth as a symbol now,' Jones says. Using cartoons as her main visual references, Jones sees the mouths in her latest work as open, maybe yelling or laughing or screaming or crying. 'Those are quite extreme emotions,' she says, explaining the way mouths doing those things are usually attached to a body that is dysregulated or overwhelmed. Jones is so adept at describing her process and intention as an artist, but leaves the meaning of her work more open-ended. Each viewer will have their own response to the work: 'My way is just one way,' she says. 'So many people are intimidated by visual art. I want people to feel like the works invite them to speak.' Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons will be at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 10 June to 19 October; her commission for the Courtauld Gallery, London, opens on 25 September
Daily Mail
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
King Charles's bond with his cousin Lady Sarah Chatto: The pair share a talent and passion for painting and the arts
Although she does not undertake official duties, Lady Sarah Chatto is a beloved member of the Royal Family. Sarah, 61, who is the daughter of Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones, the 1st Earl of Snowdon, shared a strong bond with her aunt, Queen Elizabeth II. After Margaret's death, the pair grew closer and the late Queen frequently invited Sarah to her favourite hideaway, Craigowan Lodge, in Aberdeenshire. Sarah is also believed to have a close relationship with her cousin, King Charles III. The two are said to enjoy spending leisure time painting together at Balmoral whenever possible. Princess Margaret and Armstrong-Jones, had two children: David, born in 1961, and Sarah, born in 1964. However, their marriage was marred by infidelity, ultimately leading to their divorce in 1978 after a turbulent two-year separation. During this difficult time, family holidays at the royal estates of Sandringham and Balmoral provided some comfort for 14-year-old Sarah, who often spent time with cousins Prince Andrew and Prince Edward. Sarah and her brother, David, spent much of their childhood at Kensington Palace, where their parents were a strong influence in their lives. Lord Snowdon, a renowned society photographer, nurtured their creative talents in art and design, with Sarah and David going on to become an artist and furniture maker, respectively. Sarah developed a particular passion for landscape painting - an interest she shares with her cousin, King Charles. After leaving school with an A-level in Art, Sarah studied at the Camberwell School of Art and later the Royal Academy Schools. Since 1995, she has been exhibiting works of art, under her maiden name - Sarah Armstrong-Jones - at The Redfern Gallery in London. In a recent show, over three-quarters of Sarah's paintings were sold, most of which were expressive landscapes rendered in bold colours. She has been honoured with numerous awards, including the Winsor & Newton Prize in 1988 and the Creswick Landscape Prize in 1990. Like his cousin, King Charles is a talented artist and has become quite a dab hand with watercolours. Charles has been interested in the artform since he was a young child, and during his youth he painted his parents, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. In 2022, 79 of the King's watercolour pieces were displayed at Chelsea's Garrison Chapel, marking the first full exhibition of his work in the medium. The paintings depicted Scottish landscapes, such as the Huna Mill at John O'Groats and Glen Callater near Balmoral, and scenes from the south of France and Tanzania. In a display panel, Charles said the hobby 'refreshes parts of the soul which other activities can't reach'. He continued: 'It all requires the most intense concentration and consequently is one of the most relaxing and therapeutic exercises I know. 'In fact, in my case, I find it transports me into another dimension which, quite literally, refreshes parts of the soul which other activities can't reach.' Sarah has strong royal connections, having served as a chief bridesmaid at Princess Anne's 1973 wedding to Mark Phillips and Charles's 1981 nuptials to Princess Diana. She is also a godmother to their son, Prince Harry. Additionally, she is a godmother to Lady Louise Windsor, the daughter of Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex, as well as to Lady Rose Gilman, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. Following in her mother's footsteps, Sarah, who is 28th in line to the throne, became president of The Royal Ballet School in June. She had previously served as vice president for 20 years. Although she maintains a relatively low profile, she is known to attend significant royal events, such as last year's Royal Ascot. Demonstrating their close relationship, Sarah and her family accompanied the King and Queen to Crathie Kirk on the first anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's death in 2023. She, along with her husband, Daniel, and their two sons, Samuel and Arthur, were seen walking to and from the service.
New Statesman
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The second birth of JMW Turner
JMW Turner baffled his contemporaries. At the beginning of his career he was a prodigy, a preternaturally gifted tyro who joined the Royal Academy Schools at 14, and at 15 became the youngest painter ever to have a picture accepted for the RA Summer Exhibition. But at the end of his career his peers found his paintings incomprehensible. All those wafty emanations of light, colour and atmospherics had no precedent and no explanation. John Ruskin thought his late work displayed 'distinctive characters in the execution, indicative of mental disease'. A fellow painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, thought that 'Turner's pictures always look as if painted by a man who was born without hands' who had 'contrived to tie a brush to the hook at the end of his wooden stump.' One critic was inspired by Turner's ochre depictions of the ruins of Rome to brush off his Latin: the paintings, he said, were 'cacatum non est pictum' – crapped not painted. The man himself was equally mystifying. For the last five years of his life he had been living with a woman named Sophia Booth, a twice-widowed guesthouse landlady 20 years his junior. Although he had a grand albeit dusty residence-cum-gallery in Marylebone, the pair lived as man and wife – though they never married – in a house by the river ('a squalid lodging, in a squalid part of what at best is squalid Chelsea', according to a newspaper report) and was taken for a retired seaman known as Admiral Booth: the local children called him 'Puggy'. Just as his neighbours had no idea that the squat old man dressed in black was in fact the most famous painter in England, nor did they have any idea of his means. Not only had he accrued great wealth but as well as the big house in Queen Anne Street there was also land in Dagenham and a pub, The Ship and Bladebone, in Wapping, which he would visit anonymously at weekends. At 20, he was investing money from the sale of his watercolours in Bank of England stocks and his finances were to remain a topic of intense interest to him – whether maximising his profits from prints or hard-nosed negotiations over the price of his paintings – and could go to excessive lengths. When staying with one longtime patron, Sir John Leicester, his host asked him to look over some of his own amateur efforts at painting; Turner then sent the baronet a bill for the 'lesson'. A disgruntled Leicester settled the invoice but bought only one more Turner after the incident. Here was a man who travelled everywhere with a carpet-bag he kept locked and never vouchsafed its contents; whose sketching kit included not just watercolour paints and paper but an umbrella with a dagger concealed in its handle in case of footpads; an artist who tried always to paint with the door locked and who, if observed, would cover up his picture until the prying eyes moved on; a man who numbered the pioneering scientists Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday among his friends but who failed to impress the younger French romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, who thought 'he looked like an English farmer, with a black coat of coarse stuff, thick-soled shoes, and a cold, hard expression'. This was the man whose body was retrieved by his friends from squalid Chelsea where he died in 'moral degradation', as a later account put it, and conveyed in secrecy to decent Marylebone. Turner had known he was reaching the end – a diet of milk, sherry and sucked meat proving insufficient to sustain him. When his doctor gave him his prognosis, the artist responded: 'So, I am to become a nonentity, am I?' He himself, after a lifetime of unshakeable self-belief, knew this wasn't the case and with the scandal of his living – and dying – arrangements averted, he received a funeral befitting his status at St Paul's Cathedral. There, as he waits out eternity, this son of a Covent Garden barber and mentally unstable mother, has lofty artistic company – Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Sir Christopher Wren, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and Sir John Everett Millais among them. What earned Turner his place among art's knights was a career that redefined what landscape painting could do. Despite his training at the RA Schools, where antique casts and the life model were the primary teaching aids, Turner never mastered the human figure. His most concerted efforts were in a series of erotic nudes, many of which were subsequently burned by Ruskin (who, once again, thought them 'assuredly' evidence of 'insanity') to preserve his reputation: the surviving sheets are not stirring. His landscapes, however, still quicken the pulse. This year marks the 250th anniversary of Turner's birth, an event being celebrated with a flurry of exhibitions across the country which will present the full range of his achievements in the genre: at his former house in Twickenham; at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate and the Whitworth in Manchester; at grand houses where he used to be a guest, such as Harewood House in Leeds and Petworth House in Sussex; and at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, Preston Park Museum in County Durham, the Holburne Museum in Bath and at Tate Britain (paired with his contemporary John Constable). Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Turner started out as a topographical draughtsman of rare refinement, able to capture in watercolour not just the detail but the evocativeness of the ruins of Tintern Abbey four years before Wordsworth complemented him in verse, or the tracery of Llandaff Cathedral and just-so-ness of Bolton Abbey sitting timelessly in its river valley. Such views were among the first of more than 37,500 works on paper he produced over the decades and were popular with collectors touched by the emerging taste for antiquarianism and a new appreciation for Britain's ancient buildings and landscapes whetted by the continent being closed off by the Napoleonic Wars. As early as 1791, Turner made his first out-of-London tour, visiting Bristol and the West Country, and from then on he would venture out sketching and sightseeing every year – from Wales and the Lake District to the Isle of Wight and Sussex. In 1802, with the Peace of Amiens bringing a temporary halt to the war with the French, he journeyed to Paris and Switzerland. In 1819 he added Italy and everything it meant artistically and historically to his list, taking in Venice, Rome, Naples, Paestum and Florence. Such first-hand experience was vital to his development. Turner was born at a time when theories about landscape, and the distinction between the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime in nature, had been given prominence by the likes of Edmund Burke and William Gilpin. On his travels he saw the categories reflected in real vistas and in all weathers. As he put it: 'There's a sketch at every turn.' However, his most profound engagement with the landscape came through art. When he saw two paintings by the 17th-century classicist Claude Lorrain in the collection of the financier John Julius Angerstein, he was shaken. According to a witness, on encountering Claude's Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, 'Turner was awkward, agitated and burst into tears.' And from that moment on he considered Claude's 'amber-coloured ether' and paintings humming with 'every hue and tone of summer's evident heat, rich, harmonious, true and clear' to be the highpoint of landscape art. When he wanted to imbue his own pictures with the 'grand manner' of history paintings, he adopted the Frenchman's high viewpoint with framing trees, his softening middle grounds with water (water features in fully half of Turner's pictures), and his hazy, mountainous horizons. Claude painted the Roman Campagna, Turner shone that rich and warm light on Wales, Yorkshire and the Thames Valley. The strength of the affinity felt by him for both Claude and for landscape as an elevated subject was made clear in 1829 when he made his first will. In it he provided for a Chair of Landscape at the Royal Academy and a gold Turner Medal for landscape painting; instructed almshouses to be built for 'decayed English artists and single men' as long as they were landscapists, and left a large bequest of his paintings to the National Gallery with the stipulation that two of them, Dido Building Carthage and Sun Rising Through Vapour, should be hung alongside a pair of Claudes, Landscape With the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca and Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba. It was Claude's 'ether' that lay behind his later experiments in atmospheric landscape where his earlier fidelity to observed nature turned into something more experimental: 'It is necessary to mark the greater from the lesser truth,' he said, 'namely the larger and more liberal idea of nature from the comparatively narrow and confined; namely that which addresses itself to the imagination from that which is solely addressed to the eye.' Not that the two were separate. The story behind his Snow Storm (1842) – that he was tied to the mast of a steamship to observe a blizzard at sea – is almost certainly apocryphal but he did have himself rowed to the centre of the Thames to make documentary sketches of pyromaniacal excitement as the Houses of Parliament were consumed by flames in 1834. There is a ring of truth too to the tale of Turner in 1810 standing in the doorway of his friend Walter Fawkes's house in Yorkshire and jotting on the back of a letter visual impressions of a storm barrelling down the valley. He told Fawkes's son, who was watching him, that he would see the same storm again in two years, this time in a painting. Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, with its swirling vortex of stygian cloud, was first exhibited in 1812 and remains one of his most celebrated works. The mature Turner was never a painter of line but always one of mass, tone and light. For him the four elements were interchangeable; he treated land as if it were air and air as if it were water. 'Indistinctness is my forte', Turner acknowledged, but he used that indistinctness to express his pantheistic stirrings. The mists and vapours, deliquescing views and washes of colour that took his paintings to the edge of abstraction and so appalled his contemporaries are not just emotions but expressions of the numinous. After all, as he famously said, 'The sun is God.' The potency and resonance of these pictures was not recognised fully for a century after his death. Kenneth Clark recalled seeing rolls of these canvases piled up in the cellars of the National Gallery in the 1940s where they were mistaken for old tarpaulins, and even glimpsing a watercolour sheet used to patch a broken window. It wasn't until the decades of abstract expressionism and Mark Rothko that Turner was hailed not just as a proto-impressionist but a colour field painter avant la lettre. Turner had earned his late style, the technical brilliance of his first four decades freed him to pursue art of increasing experimentation. He claimed to be always driven by some 'fresh follery' but it was 'follery' that led to paintings of extraordinary profundity. Related
The Guardian
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Why JMW Turner is still Britain's best artist, 250 years on
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.
