Joseph Mallord William Turner

In the early 19th century, an English painter visited Venice, and in doing so, he was maintaining an old tradition. For centuries, young artists had made an Italian journey as part of their artistic education. This was no student, but an artist who had achieved fame and fortune exhibiting his work for 30 years. The Venetian landscape would inspire works that would form the climax to the career of an English master, Joseph Mallard William Turner. Turner was born in London in the spring of 1775. His father was a barber, although less is known about his mother other than that she was mentally unbalanced. Joseph had a strong relationship with his father, who encouraged his son's artistic ambitions by displaying his drawings in his barber shop window. At 14, Turner enrolled at London's Royal Academy of Art, and by 1790, he was already unlocking his potential. The Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth, was displayed at the 1790 Royal Academy exhibition. This precocious image reveals Turner's willingness to go beyond his formal training in pursuit of artistic excellence. It is clearly influenced by the work of Thomas Moulton, an artist whose success was based on the painting of architectural subjects. Turner studied under Moulton in his spare time, and the influence of his mentor is reflected in this image of St Anselm's Chapel, Canterbury, exhibited in 1794. Turner was well on his way to mastering an artistic medium that he would use throughout his working life, the medium of watercolour. Turner began painting in watercolours at the beginning of his artistic career, and the reason for that was he began his career as a topographical painter, and it was very common for people who did views of places to use watercolour, which was relatively quick. It was also relatively inexpensive. Turner was always experimental, and from his early watercolours, like beautifully detailed Tintin Abbey, we find that he's able to use watercolour for much more expressive purposes. I think the reason why he liked watercolour so much was because of its immediacy. I mean, same reason everybody likes watercolour. It's fresh, it's immediate, it's easy to handle when you're working, or easier than oil paint, anyway, to handle when you're working outdoors, and you can get instant impressions. When he travelled a lot, he had something containing his watercolours. I think he had it specially made, if I remember correctly, with watercolours in it, and he would do very quick on-the-spot paintings and then take them back to his hotel or an inn or wherever he was staying and work them up into a big painting. Turner was known to be extremely secretive about his working methods. He did not like people to watch him when he was at work. But we do have one account, and this is from the young son of his patron, Walter Fawkes, of Farnley in Yorkshire. Walter Fawkes had asked Turner, who was staying with him, whether he would produce an image of a man-of-war taking on stores. And Turner took the young son beside him while he realised this particular commission. And the boy was astonished to find Turner literally soaking the paper with watercolour, with paint, and then scrubbing around at it so that the colours became confused and blurred. And then somehow, over the process of a morning, drawing out from that extraordinary background tiny, infinite details of the wigging and so on of the man-of-war. So, in this way, we get a very unusual first-hand experience of just how unconventional Turner was in the way that he used his medium. In 1794, Turner entered the Monroe School, an unofficial London art establishment run by Dr James Monroe, a keen amateur painter. Turner was paid to copy works of art alongside other aspiring artists. These included Thomas Gurtin, who joined forces with Turner to copy the drawings of the landscape artist J. R. Cousins. Gurtin drew the outlines before Turner filled them in with watercolour wash. Cousins' Swiss landscapes made a strong impression on Turner. But unlike some other English masters, he was keen to absorb the aesthetic philosophy of the Royal Academy's founding president, Sir Joshua Reynolds. By the mid-1790s, Turner had tackled oil painting for the first time. Turner arrived at the Royal Academy at the earliest possible age of 14. He was very, very advanced for his age. And he later became a professor of perspective at the Academy. But I think he did listen to what Reynolds said. Every year, Reynolds would give a discourse, which was a very important occasion, and Turner would have probably heard his last one before he retired in 1790. And it's said that the room was so crowded that they were afraid the floor was going to collapse. Reynolds was very old when Turner came to the Royal Academy schools, but he was still a very vital force in the Academy. His attitudes to landscape painting, and indeed to all aspects of painting, was that intellect should dominate over emotion. Turner remained a great admirer of Reynolds throughout his life. One might have thought that Turner was a landscape painter, Reynolds was a history painter. Reynolds really didn't have very much for him, especially as Reynolds himself, in his discourses, clearly doesn't think very much of landscape painting. But I think the real reason for Turner admiring Reynolds is that he saw Reynolds giving painting a new status. The Royal Academy gave a new status to art, not only a social status, but also an intellectual status. And in a way, rather like Constable, in fact, he saw Reynolds as providing a challenge, if you like, an opportunity for landscape painting to take on the kind of seriousness that Reynolds had mapped out for history painting. So Reynolds remains a guide for him, even though Reynolds is talking about history painting rather than landscape. Fisherman at Sea was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1796. Its subject matter is significant. Turner was fascinated by the sea, and his genius for capturing the dynamics of sea water is already hinted at in his first exhibited oil painting. It is also an effective study of moonlight, which was good news for an artist at a time when such nocturnal scenes were in vogue. Another moonlit sea from 1797 was simply entitled Moonlight, a Study at Millbank, depicting a night-time image of the Thames, a river that Turner always found deeply inspiring. Turner was prepared to use popular subject matter whilst allowing his own artistic identity to develop. At the time, grand depictions of historical, biblical or mythological subjects were sought after. But Turner had decided to devote himself to a genre the art establishment considered the most inferior of them all, the art of landscape. Landscape was only one kind of the whole great range of paintings which Turner undertook. I think he found in landscape that he could use it as a vehicle for an expression of feelings, of emotions, a kind of sensibility that he could bring perhaps to a higher pitch in his landscapes because he could push them, as he did in his later years, almost to the point of abstraction. Perhaps one of the reasons why he stuck with landscape painting was because he belonged to that generation who really did believe that the landscape painter was a kind of explorer, somebody who was finding out about the natural world, somebody who, in a sense, was rather like a scientist from that point of view. And he was himself very much an explorer. He travelled a lot, investigated all different kinds of weather and atmospheric conditions. He climbed the Alps, he went on sea journeys. So I think it was that exploration of the natural world that fascinated him. One of his contemporaries said that he had a wonderful range of mind. He was always asking about things and he took a geological journal to find out about the way rocks were made and that sort of thing. So he had a very inquiring mind and I think landscape added to that. Turner's achievement as a landscape artist is only rivalled by the work of his contemporary, John Constable. Both artists had different creative approaches. Turner continued in the academic tradition of idealised landscapes, as executed by the old masters. Constable's finest landscapes depict the small area of Suffolk's Stour Valley, where he grew up. His travelling schedule was also limited. He never left England in his life. Turner was the complete opposite. Whilst still in his teens, he began to journey all over Great Britain in pursuit of inspiration. Turner and his art were completely integrated. Everything he did was for the sake of his art. He lived for the sake of his art. He first went on his first trip at the age of about 15. And I think at that time he may have wanted to get away from his home because he was living in very difficult circumstances. His mother was going insane. He had a very turbulent childhood. Turner was restless for experience. He travelled from a very early age, first in England, going in his teens to Oxford, the West Country, and later to Scotland and to Wales, filling his sketchbooks. And those sketchbooks are what prompted his exceptional visual memory. Because Turner was mature when he travelled and because he had a very good business head on his shoulders, he would have seen the social and professional advantages in meeting up with all kinds of wealthy and influential people who were doing the Grand Tour. Throughout the 1790s, Turner made regular journeys across Great Britain. In 1797, he sketched the rugged mountain landscape of the Lake District. One of these sketches depicted Buttermere Lake, a scene which Turner chose to work into a full-scale oil painting back in London. This brooding landscape was one of the artist's contributions to the 1798 Academy Exhibition, an event which often displayed Turner's most recent works. Turner was deeply attached to the Royal Academy. In his later years, he referred to the institution as his mother, perhaps reflecting his unfortunate experience of his real mother. She died in 1804, after a long period of mental illness which led to her confinement in London's Bethlehem Asylum, the dreaded Bedlam. After her death, her son never mentioned her existence in conversation, which was entirely in keeping with his character. As Turner was a deeply secretive man, our knowledge of his private life is scarce. He never married, but he did have a mistress who produced two children. Later in his life, Turner also lived in London with the widow Sophia Booth, under the pseudonym Mr Booth. This deliberate anonymity was typical of him. Conversely, Turner's 1801 canvas, Dutch boats in a gale, earned him much public attention. Turner was already a master of painting clouds, and the choppiness of his sea is more dynamic than in his early moonscapes. It is a threatening scene, and yet Turner's skills of composition make this a unified painting in one of the most demanding of all artistic genres, seascape. Painting the elements is notoriously very difficult indeed. So when he's painting seascapes, obviously he had a tough job. But on the other hand, there was the example of the 17th-century Dutch maritime painters, and the strongest influence on him was in fact van der Belde. Certainly Turner, as well as drawing on the work of Claude from the old masters, he drew on the tradition of Dutch seascape paintings, and so he learnt certain devices from them. But his particular virtuosity, I think, really comes through in the way in which he was prepared to manipulate the seascape for emotional intensity. We know that Turner on one occasion insisted that he should be lashed to the mast of a ship and taken out in a storm for 4 hours so that he should feel these terrifying shifts of the horizon as the boat was tossed around on stormy waves, and somehow that sensation, that experience could be reinterpreted through the medium of paint. He begins to explore the power of the waves in a way that had never been done before. He shows them as dynamic forces, ones that are sort of sweeping you up, and he was criticised by various people at the time for not making his water look wet, but as his great defender John Ruskin said, Turner understood that a more important thing to show about waves was their power, and that when waves are whipped up by the wind in the high sea, they are very solid looking, they're full of froth, they aren't transparent like a mill pond, and that it's that quality he wants to produce. He's showing you an experience that is beyond normal, what it's like to be out on the high seas, and he's really enveloping you in this experience, perhaps more powerfully and directly than he does in any other kind of painting. This painting secured Turner's full membership of the Royal Academy in February 1802. By this time, Turner was just 26 years of age and a well-known artist. A month after his Academy election, a peace treaty was signed between Britain and Napoleonic France, enabling English citizens to travel freely to the continent. Turner took advantage immediately, and that summer he left Britain for the first time. But he almost failed to set foot on continental soil. A storm at the French port of Calais nearly swamped his ferry, and the ship was fortunate to berth safely. Turner made this harrowing event the subject for one of his early seascapes, Calais Pier. Some audiences have detected nationalist sentiments in this painting. The French seamen seem far less able to deal with the storm than their British counterparts. Turner was patriotic, but he always drew inspiration from the continent. In the summer of 1802, Turner travelled to Switzerland to experience the majesty of the Alps. Like many great artists before him, Turner used his time in Switzerland creating over 400 sketches. All his life, Turner was a voracious sketcher. As many as 19,000 such works survive, and his early Swiss drawings resulted in especially fine, completed works of art. For years after he returned to England, Turner painted landscapes inspired by his time in the mountains. Turner painted a watercolour of Riechenbach Falls in 1804. Years previously, Turner had proved his mastery of depicting architecture. With works like this, he proved that he could achieve the same sense of solidity and perspective with what we might call natural architecture, nature in the raw. This is a romantic feature of much of Turner's finest work, and it is visible in Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons, another image inspired by his Swiss travels. Again, the subject matter is the power of nature, and Turner did not need to include any human figures to convey a sense of the true proportions of man. The raw power of nature is one aspect of the sublime, and that was something that was of tremendous and vital importance to him. He felt somehow that he needed to be, I think, absolutely subsumed in the power of nature. The idea of a lone traveller struggling against the forces of nature was very much one of the themes which romantic writers had explored. I think that in showing these depictions of raw nature, Turner was also making an imaginative response to growing industrialisation in his own time, industrialisation and mechanisation. Here was something which couldn't be controlled. Nature could be destructive, ruthless, and was not under the control of man. Fall of an Avalanche is a good example of Turner's ability to capture the awesome aspects of the natural environment. But images such as Fall of an Avalanche and the shipwreck canvas from 1805 were not exhibited at the Royal Academy. Instead, Turner displayed them in his own gallery. By extending his residence on London's Harley Street, Turner turned his home into an ongoing one-man exhibition of art. Turner's one-man shows were ones that he held in his own studio, and he started them in the first decade of the 19th century. He wasn't the first person to do this. Gainsborough, for example, had had one-man shows in his own house in the 1780s after he broke with the Academy. What perhaps makes Turner exceptional is that this gallery persists much longer, and the longer he goes on in his career, the fuller it gets, so it becomes an extraordinary phenomenon in itself. And we, I think, must be grateful for that, because in the latter part of his career, when his work was looking more and more extraordinary to his contemporaries and there were many pieces that he painted that he never actually exhibited in the Academy, but which were actually in his own studio. So you might say, in the end, his gallery helps to preserve the great variety of his work that we know now. The purpose behind building the gallery was partly through, I think, his own self-confidence, even as a very young man, and partly because he was already quarrelling with the Academy hierarchy. And although, as an academician, he didn't have to submit his paintings to the judges, to the panel of judges who selected what went into the summer exhibition, he could bypass that, but even so, he felt he could make a kind of moral and economic stand by only exhibiting one or two things in the summer exhibition, meanwhile staging his own rival exhibition at Harley Street. Turner's gallery proved successful, and he developed deep friendships with many of his wealthy patrons. As a result, much of his time was spent at English country residences. One of these was Farnley Hall in Yorkshire, the home of Turner's friend Walter Fawkes, and the unlikely inspiration for this famous canvas of 1812. Two years before this image was first exhibited, Turner was spellbound by a thunderstorm that he witnessed whilst staying with Fawkes in Yorkshire. He decided to turn this experience into the dominant feature of a swirling painting. But the formal subject matter here is not 19th century England, but 3rd century BC Europe. This is Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps. History painting, out of all the different areas of painting, as the Royal Academy saw it anyway, was the most prestigious. And of course, when you get prestigious painting, you've also got the financial rewards that went with. And Turner was ambitious, and obviously he and many other artists had to try his hand at history painting. When the painting Hannibal Crossing the Alps was produced in 1812, England was still very much under threat of invasion by Napoleonic troops. And in one way, I think that Turner was responding to that threat by engaging with another threatened invasion from ancient history, that of the Carthaginian general Hannibal attempting to invade Italy. It's got a subject, as so often with these works by Turner. There is Hannibal and his troops crossing the Alps and little figures in the bottom. And it's as though he's sort of saying you can see this conflict, fate, the nature and man, the fate of man, the conflict with nature. This becomes, so to speak, the main topic. And it's as though he's wanting to say, on one level I'm doing a history painting, on another I'm pushing through to something more universal about the fate of man. This was Turner's contribution to the 1812 exhibition at the Royal Academy. He forged closer ties with the Academy and in 1807 he was appointed Professor of Perspective, a post which he would hold for over 30 years. Perspective was a skill mastered by Turner early in his career and by the time he created images such as this, in 1815, it provided the underlying spatial structure for his landscape painting. Dido building Carthage depicts the dawn of a North African nation in the 9th century BC. Carthage was the nation of Hannibal and, like Turner's wild image of Hannibal crossing the Alps, this is a landscape painting with a historical narrative element. But this is immediately a very different kind of work. It is a scene of intense luminosity. We can feel the warm haze hanging in the air. Turner's mastery of atmosphere was now complete. This idealised image would have impressed his Academy tutor Reynolds. But this is a painting inspired by an old master, a French artist whose work made an impression on Turner as early as 1799, Claude Lorrain. He saw Claude Lorrain's paintings in somebody's house and I think it was a picture relating to Apollo and he's reported to have said that he was both pleased but unhappy when he saw this picture because he felt that somehow it was a very great picture and he would like to emulate it. The way in which Claude handled atmosphere, I think Turner regarded as particularly magical because Claude used aerial perspective. That is the way that we actually perceive distance and colour in distance so that the further away the sea or hills or buildings are, the more they tend towards lavender colours and finally towards a kind of very faintly bluey grey. All this based on observation rather than scientific fact but something which fascinated Turner and which he was able to absorb into his own approach. He realised that he couldn't imitate Claude exactly but he could, in a certain sense, go beyond him, not by painting something that was even more beautiful and more ideal but, shall we say, developing his knowledge of light and atmospherics, taking it in a new direction, leading on for Claude, so to speak. So I think in the end Claude becomes somebody who both sets a standard for him and becomes a kind of guiding light for the way that he can himself develop, moving on from Claude, going even further in the development of atmospherics. Turner considered Dido building Carthage to be his masterpiece and he acknowledged the influence of Claude in its composition. He left the canvas to the National Gallery on condition that it should be hung beside one of Claude's masterpieces. Long after Turner's death, his wish was eventually granted. Dido building Carthage was a canvas whose sense of light remains its most immediate attraction. But Turner's fascination with the effects of light was to evolve still further and political events would contribute to this. When Turner exhibited this work in the spring of 1815, the Napoleonic Wars that had engulfed Europe were on the point of dramatic conclusion. In June that year, the Battle of Waterloo ended 20 years of conflict. Peace brought freedom to travel on the continent, just as it had done briefly in 1802. Turner took advantage of this and in 1819, the 44-year-old artist set off on the most important journey of his life. His destination? Italy. The tradition of the artist's Italian journey was now well established. Rubens had spent seven years in Italy and Reynolds' career was built on what he learnt there. Turner also found the experience intensely valuable. He travelled widely, making a total of 1,500 sketches in a few weeks. Turner studied the work of the Italian masters and was especially impressed by the works of Raphael in Rome's Vatican. But it was in Venice that he received his greatest inspiration. The light that he observed here on the Adriatic coast would profoundly influence much of his greatest ever work. Turner's trip to Italy seems to have made a dramatic difference to his way of thinking about painting and about light and colour in particular. Before he went to Italy, his understanding of Italy was very much coloured by his knowledge of landscape paintings from Italy, works by Claude, for example, who'd lived and worked in Rome, or his British forebears, such as Richard Wilson, the Welsh landscape painter who had studied in Rome in the 1750s. After his return from that first journey and even more so after his later journeys, we find him combining atmosphere and colour. His paintings in Venice are wonderfully dissolving. Venice is almost pure light, colour and atmosphere rather than buildings and water. But there's another aspect, and that is that he was also able to show that colour could have a dramatic intensity that really had not been present in his work before, so that a painting like Ulysses deriding Polyphemus has very powerful reds and oranges, and these heighten the dramatic content of the painting. Turner's love of Venice is reflected in the watercolour images he produced during his stay here in 1819. The real impact of Italy on Turner's oil painting would not be seen until four years later. This is the Bay of Baiae, an 1823 canvas whose colouring is more brilliant than anything created earlier in the artist's career. The diffusion of the light also serves to soften the physical form of the landscape, an innovation that Turner would develop to an almost abstract conclusion in some of his later work. Not all of Turner's 1820s output was so radical. The Battle of Trafalgar was a far more conservative response to the first royal commission that the artist received. We know that Turner was a patriot, and there could have been few subjects more appropriate for this, his largest ever canvas. But the Battle of Trafalgar was criticised for its lack of factual accuracy, and Turner's first royal commission would also be his last. It was not the only disappointment for him around this time. In 1825, his great friend and patron, Walter Fawkes, died. Four years later, his father was also dead. Although Turner Senior was 85 years old at the time of his death, his son was devastated. He began to worry neurotically about his own mortality, and, as a response, threw himself into his work and his travels with new vigour. He visited Italy again in 1828, and now chose to spend much of his time in England at Petworth House, the home of his close friend, Lord Egremont. This mildly eccentric figure provided Turner with a small studio at his home, and the artist responded by producing some of his most experimental private works, such as this almost expressionist watercolour, ostensibly depicting a game of billiards inside Petworth House. In the 1837 canvas, Interior at Petworth, form is now almost dissolved completely. Light, expressed as colour, is the real subject matter here. Turner's exhibited work was now increasingly bold. This large canvas was painted shortly after his second Italian journey. He started to increase the key of his colour to almost overwhelming levels, and the striking results of this development can be seen in Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus. Although Ruskin described the canvas as the central picture in Turner's career, his was the minority view within critical circles of the time. The reaction was very antagonistic by critics and by other painters. The work was really much too advanced for conventional painters and the general public to appreciate. In his later years, Turner, who had always been experimental in his approach to the medium, whether it was oil or whether it was watercolour, began to push those to even further extremes of what we might call abstraction. It's quite interesting that as early as 1816, the writer William Hazlitt had said that Turner paints nothing, and that is very like. A lot of the critical reaction was quite savage. There were references to his rather bright palette as he got older. He used very strong colours, extremely strong reds used in the Petworth interiors, but certainly one critic referred to the appearance as being of eggs and spinach. And Mark Twain, writing after Turner's death, was even more vitriolic. He compared one painting to being rather like a tortoiseshell cat that had fallen into some machinery. So not everyone found Turner to their taste, but what Turner always was, I think, was the stuff of opinion and something for the critics to react to. So in that way, he always remained in the public eye. Turner was sensitive to the negative criticism that his work sometimes attracted. He was also a man who was easily irritated when not in the company of those he knew well, and this irritability was just one of his negative character attributes. As we have seen, he was almost obsessively secret about his private life, but we know also that he was a scruffy dresser, and that this was the consequence of a notorious tightness with money. As a man, Turner can hardly be said to have matched his achievements as an artist. I think Turner was, much like the rest of us, very complex, a great mixture of all kinds of attributes. On the question of secretiveness, we know how secretive he was about his working techniques, with that one brief concession to allow Walter Falk's son to see him paint his watercolour of the Man of War taking on stores. Turner does seem to have been a very miserly and very secretive person. Possibly the insecurity in his early life caused by the madness of his mother affected him in some ways, and he does get the impression of him as a bit of a loner. Perhaps this is also one of the reasons why he liked to travel a lot. He seemed to like to be anonymous, he liked to move about on his own, be very self-sufficient. The miserliness is, I think, indisputable. He was very fond of money, he made a lot of money, he was very successful, he was a very shrewd businessman. He was supported by his father, his father who was a barber and very much a self-made man himself, very tight with his own money. They knew the value of money, the Turners. In his journals, Delacroix describes a visit that Turner made to him with quite a vivid account of what he looked like. He said that he looked like an English farmer because he had a black coat and heavy boots, and, most tellingly, he had a sort of hard, cold expression. So Delacroix obviously wasn't very impressed with him. And, of course, he could be difficult, no doubt about that. So much so that I think possibly he had morbid, depressive tendencies because as early as his 60s he was already pretty unapproachable. Ultimately, the negative aspects of Turner's character are far outweighed by the sheer genius of his work and, in the final years of his career, he brought together all facets of his artistic evolution in a timeless body of images. Many of these works had a strong contemporary theme. The famous 1838 Fighting Temeraire depicts a ship that had fought at Trafalgar as it makes its final journey to the Breaker's Yard in England. The British public knew the emotional significance of the subject matter. This was the end of the age of the sailing warship, and Turner's fiery sunset is charged with symbolic meaning that contributed to the huge popularity of the painting. Also popular was another topical image, first exhibited in 1835. On the 16th of October the previous year, the Houses of Parliament were burnt to the ground in an enormous fire. Turner was in London at the time, and he rushed to the scene immediately. As the great building burned, Turner shuttled around the blaze, sketching it from different angles in pencil and in a series of small watercolours. From this one example, the audience may wonder what the subject matter is in such an impressionistic study. The same can be said of the oil painting that Turner eventually created. Again, it is the power of light dissolving form through the use of pure colour that is most remarkable. Equally compelling is an image from 1844, a landscape through which the new wonder of the steam railway has cut its path. This can be seen as a companion piece to The Fighting Temeraire. That painting represented an emotional farewell to the age of sail. With rain, steam and speed, Turner celebrated the potential of the new technology of steam, in an image typical of his later work. The new steam technology is reflected in one of Turner's latest seascapes, which features an image of a steamboat struggling through a violent storm. Turner's interest in the power of nature is evident, but with this canvas he chose to incorporate a compositional feature that we can see in a number of his late marine pictures. The viewer is drawn into the blowing force of the snowstorm swirling round the vessel in a brilliantly effective vortex arrangement. The effect of the vortex is one that absolutely draws the viewer into the painting so that we almost feel that we can experience it ourselves. We feel as though we're drawn into the centre of the blizzard. I think it's something which Turner may have developed as a compositional device when he was Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy. What I think it does for a picture is something rather unusual. At the time, people thought of landscape painting very much in terms of a clearly worked out space. You need to have a foreground, a middle ground, a background, like a stage set. Now, the vortex in a sense replaces that with the idea of focusing on the centre, focusing on the spot, so that becomes the main part of the composition and you're less concerned about what supports it. So what happens with the Turner pictures is you might say you're driven into the centre of a composition and it's a kind of engaging process. The vortex is almost like a whirlwind. It's like a kind of funnel of atmosphere and rain and mist and cloud. In the Avalanche painting, of course, the vortex also includes snow and even rocks being tossed around. But it has this terrifying force to pick you up and to involve you in that whirlwind. By the time Turner displayed this canvas at the 1842 Royal Academy exhibition, he was already 67 years of age. But he still maintained an exacting schedule of work and travel. Every summer, from 1841 to 1844, he returned to Switzerland. Journeys that inspired a wonderful series of watercolours. But Turner never exhibited any of these small images. His public work was now mainly seascapes in oil. With Peace Burial at Sea from 1842, Turner paid tribute to a fellow artist, Sir David Wilkie. He had died at sea in 1841 and Turner chose to depict the moment that his body was committed to the deep, with the whole event highlighted by an intense shaft of light. It is another example of Turner's later approach to seascape. But perhaps the one canvas that best brings together all aspects of Turner's genius is this image, created in 1840. Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying. Typhoon coming on. This is another canvas depicting an actual event, a shameful incident that took place on a slaving ship in 1783. During a fierce storm, slaves were thrown overboard in order for the shipping company to make insurance claims that would have been invalid had they died of disease, as so many unfortunate souls did. It was and still is a gruesome incident and Turner does not spare us the human horror. But it remains an astonishing study in the power of nature. At that time there was a great movement towards ending slavery and this is a picture set in the 18th century, I think the last quarter of the 18th century, and it's about the slave ship called Zong. And the master of the slave ship, the captain, decided he would actually throw overboard the dead and the dying because if he kept them on board he wouldn't have been able to claim insurance. Turner in the picture has dwelt on the horror of this. You can see in the foreground, you can see limbs and things of presumably the dead and dying slaves and the whole picture is then covered with this tremendous storm. There's a storm brewing and you can see the boat reeling backwards and forwards. And it's interesting because not only is it a wonderful painting of a very powerful, angry storm, you feel that in this case he's really wanted to give a kind of moral anger to the storm. Perhaps what is most striking of all is there's a sort of blood-red sunset which seems again to express this concept of divine anger, anger at what is happening. And the ship itself, all the rigging has turned blood-red, so it's almost like the red of guilt. And you can see the way in which he's using symbolic colour in order to express something about which he felt very intensely. I think its power lies in the way which Turner would address this apparently totally uncongenial subject and turn it into something that was symbolic and powerful. Ruskin was fascinated by it, but he was also frightened of it. That's, in one way, why it's now in America, that Ruskin, who owned it at one time, felt he couldn't keep it in his possession. Turner's illustrious career finally ended with his death on 19th December 1851 at his home in London overlooking the Thames. He had been a professional artist for 60 years. In itself, this was a remarkable achievement. The sheer amount of work that he produced in his lifetime was awesome. But it is the quality of that work that we appreciate today. The enduring achievement of J. M. W. Turner, the last of the English masters.