4⧸4 The Genius of Turner ： Painting the Industrial Revolution

It all begins with the scientist Michael Faraday. In 1821, he demonstrated the theory of magnetic rotation with the world's first electric motor. The connection being now made from the plates to the copper wire and to the mercury below, the copper wire immediately begins to revolve around the pole of the magnet. A decade later, Faraday showed that an electric current could be generated through exposure to a magnetic field. The relation which holds between the fixed magnetic pole, the moving wire or metal, and the direction of the current evolved. At the same time, Turner and Faraday's friend, the mathematician Mary Somerville, was introducing the idea of electromagnetism to a wider public in a best-selling book. Dr Faraday observes that such is the facility with which electricity is evolved by the Earth's magnetism that scarcely any piece of metal can be moved in contact with others. Turner knew Mary Somerville very well indeed. They were good friends. Mary Somerville talked many times of going to Turner's studio and always being welcomed. Even a ship, passing over the surface of the water in northern or southern latitudes, ought to have electric currents running directly across the line of her motion. Curious electromagnetic combinations probably exist, which have never yet been noticed. What is Turner doing in Snowstorm? Is he describing just the kind of things Somerville and Faraday were talking about? Is this the visual manifestation of the invisible magnetic forces in nature? The key point for Snowstorm, in my view, is the visual parallel that it creates between the sea as a vast uncontrollable force and the invisible powers of the Earth's magnetism. Underneath the chaos, there's a real regularity. The waves have a sort of a hairy quality that gets very near the effect of putting iron filings in a magnetic field with a bar magnet, how they gather around the bar magnet. I think there's a direct connection. Magnetism was in the air. Michael Faraday was working on it. Turner and Faraday had conversations. Their mutual friend, Mary Somerville, was beginning to write about these and other scientific topics and making them much more publicly accessible. All these things go together and suddenly Snowstorm appears. It's the idea of a ship as the focus of all this massive energy. This isn't a scientific diagram. Turner's not trying to explain the Earth's magnetism, but he's trying to express what this power is. We are looking at a visual metaphor. Turner had found a new way of painting. He'd created a visual language to express nature's hidden forces. Whatever he's understood about magnetism and about science, the key thing he's taken from it is an understanding of flux and of dynamism. And if you stand in front of the snowstorm and look at that tilted horizon and look at that vortex, you realise that you yourself have been caught up in that same rhythm. By 1840, Turner, now in his 60s, was making regular trips to Margate, a seaside town on the Kent coast. He'd been visiting Margate since his childhood. Now it was a second home. The thing about Margate is Margate is very gritty and it has really strange light and amazing sunsets and it's got a lot of fecundity in the atmosphere. There's something sexy about it. And I think artists and people pick up on that. In Margate, Turner settled in with a new mistress, Mrs Booth. This may be a picture of her. It's part of a stash of erotic drawings by Turner, found after his death. Of course, when he became close to Mrs Booth, his landlady in Margate, he used to call himself Handel Booth and pretend to be a retired naval man. There are stories late in life when he was getting more and more reclusive. If he took a cab, he would get it to drop him off several streets away so that people wouldn't discover his real identity. Turner loved to cultivate this air of mystery. Few people were allowed to see him at work. But one artist who did was Edward Rippingill, who witnessed Turner putting the final touches to one of his paintings. In one part of the mysterious proceedings, Turner, who worked almost entirely with his palette knife, was observed to be rolling and spreading a lump of half-transparent stuff over his picture. What is that he's blastering his picture with? Presently, the work was finished. Turner gathered his tools together and then, with his face still to the wall, went sliding off. All it was for these witnesses was a master magician doing something that they couldn't comprehend. OK, you want to see how it's done? Here's how it's done. This is how it was done in 1844. One of Turner's last great oil paintings. A train hurtling out of the canvas into the future. It's all there in this one extraordinary picture. The scientific discoveries, the engineering breakthroughs, the industrial upheavals come together in Turner's vision of the New Britain. It's about atmosphere. A train crossing a bridge, puffing out smoke and soot on a rather wet, misty day in the Thames Valley. Just the title, Rain, Steam and Speed, everything pouring, you know, it's kind of like, it's exciting. It's hitting the same note as Temeraire, so you have the kind of, the world of old motion drifting along in that little boat, while it's... It's sort of coming along. The firebox has almost eaten through the casing of the engine chassis as it roars towards you. This is the Great Western Railway. This is Brunel's fantastic engineering achievement. It's the jewel in the crown of the railway system. The railway bridge over which the train is going is Isambard Kingdom Brunel's. So it is a homage to one of the defining figures of Victorian Britain. When this picture is painted, we're just about a decade and a half into the history of the railways. I mean, remember, before the railways arrived, nobody had gone faster than a horse could gallop. And now we have these railways that, even by 1844, when this picture is done, are going 30, 40 miles an hour, and they're soon to go 50, 60 miles an hour. Unheard of speeds. It really is transformational. The Great Western was even responsible for standardising time. There was a time difference between, say, Exeter and London of about 15, 20 minutes, because it was set by the rising of the sun. And it was thanks to the Great Western that we have Greenwich Mean Time. And if you look very closely, there is a hare that's running for its life in front of the train. I mean, the hare is, in Britain anyway, the fastest natural animal. So you've got this contrast between the modern industrial speedy machine and the natural speedy animal. The train in Rain, Steam and Speed is not just a train rushing at us, but it's also a reminder of the modern world and how the modern world is changing the landscape, changing society, changing individual lives. The coming of the railway is the destruction of many, many homes and the lives of ordinary people, especially building the stations in London and in all the cities, driving through Old England. The people that most resented it are by now the sort of ageing romantics like Wordsworth and Ruskin, who feared that these hordes would invade their beauteous landscapes. But Turner's painting is a great cheer for Brunel, I think. When the novelist and art critic William Thackeray first saw Rain, Steam and Speed, he knew he was looking at something completely new in painting. The rain in the astounding picture is composed of dabs of dirty putty slapped onto the canvas with a trowel. The sunshine scintillates out of very thick, smeary lumps of chrome yellow. The world has never seen anything like this picture. He's using paint to make us feel what it was like to be there. I mean, Thackeray commented on the fact that when you got up close to the picture, you really couldn't get away from the thickness of the paint. We shouldn't say that only Impressionism and the modern movement had these revelations. I think what makes Turner extraordinary is that he came upon these understandings in the 19th century. Look at the rest of the Victorian painting around this time, including mates of his like Wilkie, who he loved. I mean, it's pathetically rudimentary and laborious and literal. The notion that you, as a fellow, you know, of the Royal Academy, would make this kind of maelstrom of paint and deliver it as art, you tell me, who else is doing that? No, the answer is no-one. It isn't simply nice little curlicues of smoke coming out of a funnel. It's somebody who understands how steam power has harnessed heat and turned it into motion. Nobody else had found a way of painting that transformation. He wanted to sort of instinctively see if belching smoke and a cantering train would generate that kind of beauty. What he does is the industrial sublime. It's a kind of modernisation, perhaps, of the sublime. It's making it applicable to a modern age. Which is making scientific and technological advances and is learning to harness nature. You know, the sublime usually presupposes the intrusion of something mechanical as the enemy. It's not the enemy for Turner. The most atmospheric of all of Turner's paintings, where all the elements come together, earth, air, fire and water, becomes a celebration of progress. For Turner, industry becomes the sublime. It's as though those natural forces have been harnessed by mankind for their own betterment. The volcanoes and hurricanes that might traditionally be associated with the sublime now occur inside boilers and drive pistons. No-one had thought like that, painted like that, imagined it like that. And it's not going to be repeated, arguably, until one gets into the 1910s. He was painting what was happening, the reality of that time. Because he had his finger on the pulse, he managed to achieve something quite phenomenal. And that's what makes Turner a great artist. I think he's phenomenally important for the history of art and the history of Britain. This, then, is J.M.W. Turner, Britain's great romantic landscape painter, who delivered to us a visionary story of the Industrial Revolution, who painted nature, and at the same time revealed the wonders of science and invention, who used paint to herald a new world. Next Friday, the story of an extraordinary woman who discovered and named radioactivity and paid the ultimate price. The genius of Marie Curie. But next tonight, nothing but the best series highlights from QI.