Turner's Paintings Hide a Dangerous Secret About Nature

I want you to picture a scene. It's the winter of 1842. Okay. We're on a steamboat, the Ariel, leaving Horwich, and it is heading straight into a huge snowstorm. The kind of storm that sends, you know, even the most experienced sailors running for cover. Exactly. But there's this 67-year-old man on the deck, and he just refuses to go inside. He does something that, well, it must have looked like he was trying to end it all. He actually demands that the sailors lash into the mast. Tied to the mast. It sounds like something from a myth, you know, like Odysseus. But this was real. He stayed there for four whole hours, freezing, battered by the wind and the sea. And he wasn't doing it for a thrill. He said he wanted to, and this is a quote, record the elemental fury. He needed to feel it. He had to feel the storm in his bones before he could even think about painting it. And the painting that came out of that ordeal was Snowstorm Steamboat Off a Harbor's Mouth. And if you look at it today, it feels incredibly modern. It's all just swirling chaos. Almost abstract, yeah. But at the time, oh, it was a total scandal. Well, why? What was the problem? Well, you have to remember, Victorian art was all about being polished and precise. So when the critics saw this, this swirl of gray and white, they didn't see a genius at work. They mocked it. They called it soap suds and whitewash. Soap suds and whitewash. That is just brutal. It gets even worse. One critic said his work looked like the fruits of a diseased eye. They weren't just attacking the painting. They were attacking his sanity. So they were basically saying J.M.W. Turner, the man we now call the Painter of Light, was going mad. Exactly. And that's the tension, right? How do you square these two things, the madman on the ship and the prophetic genius who saw Impressionism coming decades early? Was he a lunatic or was he just seeing the world in a way nobody else could? That's the question. And to get anywhere near an answer, you have to look at where all that chaos in his paintings came from. Because for a man obsessed with light, his own story starts in a very, very dark place. We're talking about London, 1775, Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. Right. And Maiden Lane then was not the Covent Garden you'd picture today. It was dark. It was narrow, crowded. And Turner was born right above his father's barber shop. Your dad was a barber. A wig dresser. Yeah. William Turner. And he's actually the one bit of sunshine in this early story. Sources say he was a cheerful little man, chatty with a parrot nose, very supportive of his son. He used to hang his son's drawings up in the shop window, didn't he? He did. Right next to the wigs. He'd sell them for, you know, one to three shillings. You come in for a shave, you might leave with an early Turner. So the shop downstairs is cheerful, but upstairs, that's where his mother, Mary Marshall, was. And that's where the real trauma begins. The accounts describe her as having an ungovernable temper. It was probably much more than that. The family had already lost a daughter, Turner's little sister, and that tragedy seems to have just broken Mary. So the home environment was just completely volatile. Unpredictable. And it all ended in the worst way imaginable. In 1800, she was admitted to St. Luke's, a hospital for the mentally ill, and then she was transferred to Bethlehem Hospital. Bedlam? Bedlam. The most notorious asylum in history. She died there just a few years later in 1804. The thing that always gets me is Turner's reaction. Or, well, his lack of one. He just erased her. He never spoke about her to anyone. But you can see the scars. He grew up with this deep, deep suspicion of intimacy. And there's that line from his sketchbook, isn't there? It's just devastating. He wrote, Woman is doubtful love. Doubtful love. That tells you everything. He learned very early that love could mean pain and chaos. Exactly. The home wasn't a safe place for him. It's no wonder he spent his life traveling, always moving, always looking at the horizon. He was running from the darkness. But he did try to find love once. Yeah. And the story is just, it's like a soap opera. This is the Margate chapter. He was sent to school there, probably just to get him out of the house, away from his mother. And he fell in love with the sister of a school friend. And it was real. This wasn't just a crush. No, it was a genuine romance. But he was young. He was ambitious. He had to go back to London to build his career. So he left her a self-portrait and promised he would write. And he did. He kept his promise. He wrote constantly. But he never got a single letter back. Or so he thought. Because of the girl's stepmother. The stepmother. She intercepted every single letter he sent. She just hid them. So for two years, this young woman thinks she's been completely abandoned. So she gets engaged to someone else. She feels she has no choice. And then Turner comes back. One week before the wedding. I mean, can you imagine that scene? He shows up expecting this joyful reunion. And finds out she's about to marry another man. And she couldn't break it off? Not back then. Her honor was at stake. So she went through with the wedding. Turner was absolutely crushed. He called it a bitter grief. And that's when he basically vowed never to marry. He did. And he didn't. He threw himself into his work with this ferocious energy. He even started writing this long, unfinished poem called The Fallacies of Hope. The title says it all, really. Hope was a trap. Art was the only thing you could trust. And he was unbelievably good at the art part. I mean, he was a child prodigy. Oh, absolutely. He got into the Royal Academy schools when he was just 14. He was a full academician. Part of the elite. By 26, that's just a meteoric rise. But he wasn't just talented. He was fiercely competitive. Which brings us to the varnishing days at the Academy. This is one of my favorite stories. It was pure theater. The big exhibition was the event of the year. All the paintings would be hung. And then for a few days, the academicians could come in and add final touches. So you're literally standing next to your biggest rival trying to one-up them in real time. And Turner was the absolute master of this. He'd send in canvases that were just washes of color, barely started. And then he finished the whole thing right there on the wall in front of everyone. He wanted an audience. He thrived on it. Which leads to the legendary showdown, 1832, Turner versus John Constable. The red boy incident. So Constable is the other giant of British painting at the time, but he's totally different. He paints the calm, green English countryside. He spent years on this huge painting, the opening of Waterloo Bridge. It's full of bright reds, golds, flags. It's a lot. And they hang Turner's painting right next to it. And Turner's painting, Hell Wepsleys, is this very cool, gray, atmospheric seascape. Really understated. So Turner walks in, sees his quiet, gray painting next to this explosion of red from Constable, and realizes he has a problem. A huge problem. His painting just looks flat. It's disappearing into the wall. Constable's warm reds are popping forward and Turner's cool grays are receding. So what does he do? He doesn't say a word. He just walks up to his own masterpiece, takes his brush, and puts a single, small daub of bright red paint right in the middle of his gray sea. And then he just walks away. The other artists are aghast. They think he's ruined his own painting. But he comes back. He comes back later, takes a cloth, gives the red dot a little wipe, and shapes it into a tiny buoy. And suddenly, boom, the whole painting snaps into focus. That one tiny splash of red balances everything perfectly. That is such a power move. Oh, it was complete mic drop. Constable was gutted. He apparently turned to a friend and said, he has been here and fired a gun. He knew he'd been outplayed. It's pure genius, but it's also so petty. I love it. It is. But it also shows his incredible command. He didn't need to add more detail. He just understood the science of color on this deep, intuitive level. So that's his public life. The titan of the art world. But privately, things get even stranger, right? They really do. He vowed never to marry. But he did have a long-term mistress, Sarah Danby, and two daughters that he never officially acknowledged. But the really weird part comes later in life. The double life. The Admiral Booth era? Yes. Yeah. By this point, Turner is probably the most famous artist in England. But he craves anonymity. So he finds a small cottage in Chelsea, right by the Thames, and moves in with a widow named Sophia Booth. And he doesn't tell anyone who he is. Not a soul. To all the neighbors, he's just Mr. Booth. Or, because of his gruff manner, Admiral Booth. Some even called him Puggy Booth. Puggy Booth. It couldn't be further from the Grand Painter of Light. He played the part too. He'd wear this old naval coat and just sit on the roof watching the ships go by. Why? What was the point of all that secrecy? I think it was freedom. In London, he was J.M.W. Turner. The genius. The madman. The celebrity. In Chelsea, as Admiral Booth, he was just some old guy. He could paint what he wanted without anyone judging him. Sophia Booth gave him a quiet, safe harbor. But there is one last mystery about his private life. About the sketches he left behind. Uh, the so-called erotic mystery. When Turner died, he left behind thousands upon thousands of drawings. And his great champion, the critic John Ruskin, was the one who went through them. Ruskin was the guy who always defended him. He revered him. But Ruskin was also a very buttoned-up Victorian. And the story goes, it's debated, but it persists, that Ruskin found a portfolio of sketches that were explicitly sexual. This is, what did he do? He burned them. He allegedly burned them to protect Turner's reputation. To save the sun god from his own very human, earthy side. That's horrible. It's like he was trying to erase the Admiral Booth part of him. Exactly. He wanted the legend, but he couldn't handle the man. Let's talk about that legend. That sun god part. Because as Turner gets older, his paintings get weirder. They're less about places and more about just light. He became completely obsessed with the philosophy of light. He was reading Goethe's theory of colors. What's the core idea there? Well, Newton said color is physics, you know, light through a prism. But Goethe argued that color is emotional. It's about how our eyes and our minds react to light and darkness. And for Goethe, yellow was the color closest to pure light, the color of joy. Which is why Turner started using so much yellow. So much yellow. But of course, the critics didn't get it. They called it yellow fever. They said his paintings look like scrambled eggs. Some even said he must have jaundice or some other eye disease. They thought his eyesight was failing. Right. But it wasn't a physical failure. It was a deliberate philosophical choice. And you see it most clearly in rain, steam and speed. The painting of the train. Exactly. It's 1844. The Industrial Revolution is roaring. Most artists hated trains. They were ugly, loud, dirty. They refused to paint them. But Turner leans right in. He paints a steam engine coming right at you across a bridge. But when you look closely, you can barely make out the train. It's just a smudge of black, a blur of gold, all seen through this haze of rain and steam. You don't see the train. You feel the train. You feel the speed. That's it. He wasn't painting the object. He was painting the energy, the force. He saw this new technology as a kind of modern man-made storm. It's basically abstract art 50 years before its time. It is. He understood that the new invention of photography could capture the details. The job of the artist now was to capture the sensation, the experience. He was a true prophet. So we've got the admiral hiding in Chelsea and the sun god painting the future. How does it all end? It ends right there in that little cottage with Sophia Booth in 1851. He's 76. He's bedridden. And the story is that just before he died, he had them wheel his bed to the window so he could look out at the Thames. And his famous last words. The sun is god. It really brings his whole life into focus. All the darkness he came from, the gloomy barber shop, his mother in Bedlam. He spent his entire life just chasing the light. In the end, it was the only thing he really believed in. But of course, there had to be one last bit of chaos. The will. Ah, the final tragedy. He died a very wealthy man, left a fortune of 140,000 pounds. Many millions today. And all 19,000 of his artworks to the nation. 19,000. That's an incredible gift. A staggering legacy. But the money came with a very specific condition. Turner had lived like a pauper, saved every penny. He wanted all that money to be used to build a refuge, a home for what he called decayed artists. For poor, struggling artists. Exactly. Old artists who had fallen on hard times. He wanted to give them a safe place to live out their days. It was his one great dream. But did they build it? No. The moment he died, all the distant relatives he'd ignored for decades came crawling out of the woodwork. They challenged the will. The whole thing was tied up in court for four years. And the lawyers got most of the money. The lawyers got a huge chunk. The family got the rest. And the refuge was never built. The man everyone called greedy and mad was actually the most generous of them all. And so-called sane society just tore his final wish to pieces. That's just incredibly sad. But at least we have the paintings. We have the paintings. You can go to the Tate in London and stand in front of that snowstorm and see the soap suds that changed art forever. So when we look at one of his paintings, or even just look at a really dramatic sunset, what should we be thinking? You're seeing the world through his eyes. He's the one who taught us that reality isn't about the hard edges of things. It's about light and atmosphere and feeling. He's the bridge from the old world to our world. The old admiral who steered art into modernity. By lashing himself to a mast so he could really see what the storm looked like from the inside. I think that's a great thought to end on. Sometimes you have to go right into the chaos to see clearly. If you enjoyed this journey into Turner's world, make sure you like and subscribe so you don't miss our next one. Until then!