By the end of J.M.W. Turner’s life, he had captured the past fifty years of Britain’s vastly transformed world with a dazzling display of imaginative brilliance. A man of his times, he was enthralled by the Industrial Revolution — a passion which made him acutely receptive to the intellectual currents of his day. It allowed him to paint not only luminous paintings of nature, but the powerful (even haunting) “visual manifestation” of the industrial world that defined the 19th century.
Turner’s formidable status as a singularly unique artist is the subject of The Genius of Turner: Painting the Industrial Revolution. Narrated by Samuel West and featuring commentary from a handful of scholars, it’s a thoughtful and well-executed film (aside from it’s dozen or so reenactment scenes which offer very little).
It succeeds marvelously, however, at providing a well-rounded and nuanced discussion of the environment in which Turner existed, evolved, and created his one-of-a-kind masterpieces.
At the ripe age of 14, Turner began studying art at the Royal Academy, a place where he would later hold a teaching position. And it was there that he developed his talents and was guided by the President of the school, the aging Sir Joshua Reynolds. Under his advice, Turner studied closely the paintings of Claude Lorrain — a 17th-century French artist — whose work had a lasting influence on him.
But part of the genius of Turner is that he was never beholden to one particular method or style, and certainly not vision. His art was the result of an enormous number of influences — including those which, on the surface, seem far outside the realm of art altogether.
As the documentary shows so well, the 18th-century intellectual milieu that Turner was a part of was bursting at the seams with ideas from astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, meteorology, and more. And Turner, who took an interest in everything, soaked it all up and brought it into his paintings, thereby creating art that was truly a product of its time.
From William Herschle, the pioneering astronomer of the day, Turner took away new ideas about how to capture the sun on canvas. Already the master of landscape, this expressive experimentation with the sun helped Turner produce something different — something which showed the yellow celestial body not simply as a “yellow disk,” but as a concrete and palpable thing. As one commentator notes, Turner sometimes used impasto — a “thick paint that stands up” — in order to “bring the sun as a physical object very much closer to the spectator’s attention.”
Turner, in fact, brought nature as a whole closer to the viewer’s eyes by infusing his work with artistic representations of the sublime: that lofty, and also overwhelming, feeling of nature’s powerful grandeur. Indeed one can find the awe-inspiring capacities of nature everywhere in Turner’s work. But just as present in so many of his paintings is the human-created equivalent — what Simon Schama in the film aptly called the “industrial sublime.”
Unlike some of his contemporary artists, Turner did not shy away from the monumental changes of the Industrial Revolution. The grand inventiveness of the human mind that showed itself in countless ways as Victorian Britain came to experience the power of steam — along with an array of other transforming innovations — was welcomed by Turner. He painted scenes in which nature roars mightily, yet the fragile human being counters it with the “wonders of science and invention” — as in Bell Rock Lighthouse (1819).
Turner himself was in some ways an archetype of the impassioned inventor of the Victorian age. He was bold, daring, and always eager to explore the known and unknown. He was also enviably talented and financially well-off.
But as for the qualitative experience of his personal life, there’s something about Turner that seems mildly aloof, even worthy of a bit of sympathy. Though the film spends comparatively little time delving into his personality, one commentator describes him as being “very complex.” Turner never married, but did have two children from a woman named Sarah Danby. As the same commentator says, however, “He doesn’t seem to have been a particular doting parent.”
As for his relationship with his own parents, we know that his mother was placed in an insane asylum by Turner himself. His relationship with father, on the other hand, was close, with the senior Turner mixing the son’s paints in the studio.
Whatever his personal and emotional life may have been, Turner was a supreme and original artist. The Genius of Turner adeptly shows how his extraordinary artistic abilities beautifully collided with the discoveries of his time — giving us a wealth of paintings which show nature, and ourselves, in powerfully stunning ways.
Spectatio 