The iconic image based on a painting by Turner like this:
Dolbadern Castle, 1800
Dear friends and readers,
I’m glad to start our new year off with a hearty recommendation: don’t miss Mike Leigh’s latest film, all 2 and a half hours. It’s a loving recreation insofar as this is possible in a film of the early to mid- 19th century environments and places one can imagine Joseph Mallard William Turner spent his waking, sleeping, socializing, eating, walking, networking and painting hours in (1775-1851). Visual and psychologically absorbing experiences. A touching lifelong story (don’t believe nothing happens), with other stories suggested along the way. The world of the early 19th century seems to be recreated. Lots of Turners too.
The studio (Timothy Spall as J.M.W.Turner, directed & written by Mike Leigh, with many other producers
For those interested in Austen or the later 18th century into Victorian period, the film is a visual delight as well as now and again teaching you this and that about epitomizing things, customs, manners, clothes of the era. I do not remember Leigh reveling in recreation so since High Hopes. My favorite moments were the visits to shops and when first Turner alone and then with his lady-love, common-law wife apparently, land-lady and then bed-mate and congenial companion Mrs Booth (Marion Bailey) go to have their photos taken by one of the new cameras.
There is one small problem or fault in the movie. I use the term “small” ironically. Leigh’s got Turner’s career a wee bit wrong. In the movie you get the distinct impression that all his life Turner painted wild partly indecipherable unrealistic, barely discernible pictures of tempests and bare landscapes:
What Turner is famous for
that while at first he cares about money, most of the time and especially towards the end he’s a mid-20th century Bohemian kind of guy whose one thought is to share his work with the British nation for free (he’s going to give his rooms full of pictures to the National Gallery).
Recently there was an exhibit at the Tate Gallery where a number of critics waxed ecstatic under the aegis of this theory. Not so said John Barrell in an important column in the LRB (24:18, December 18th), where he suggested the curators of the show know better. For 2/3s and more of Turner’s career he painted perfectly discernible picturesque paintings of more than landscapes, of buildings, of country houses, of ruins, of life going in rural environments; beautiful drawings of sites of memory (Tintern Abbey) in the English and European countryside, towns (as seen in the second still I took from the film).
Turner, Ruins of Dunblane Abbey, Scotland
Turner, Drachenfels, 1817
This study of Lucerne by Moonlight (not in the movie) is dated 1842
In the film there is a reference to Thackeray as a typical non-comprehending contemporary. Barrell quotes a long piece by Thackeray praising Turner strongly for representing the new technologically based world (Leigh gets that right) and showing real understanding of the painting technique. Leigh mocks Ruskin far too much too. Turner cared very much for financial success and wanted to be understood insofar as others could understand by his contemporaries. Barrell argues that the very late so-called modernist paintings are unfinished.
Nonetheless, the film survives not including the great variety of Turner’s paintings. That great variety is embodied in the production designs of the films. And there are plenty of landscapes, sublime and from the last part of his career. Leigh suggests the politics of the Royal academy and Turner’s need to sell his pictures to customers who come to his salon and whom he has to visit and spend time with.
Paul Jesson as William Turner, the father, with geologist & patroness, Lesley Manville as Mary Somerville
James Fleet is brilliantly part comic as Turner’s rival (the picture he is seen painting is one I’ve seen at the National Gallery)
as is Martin Savage as the impecunious Benjamin Hayden (whether he was so impecunious I don’t know). Clive Francis is the eager-to-please-the-public Sir Martin Arthur Shee.
Leigh creates this world Spall as Turner lives in through having so many different characters show up across the film, many played by fine actors from British TV — Sylvestre Le Tousel is Turner’s mother. Everywhere we turn more people: at a concert, playing Beethoven I spotted Raquel Cassidy the actress who plays Miss Baxter in Downton Abbey (now she’s upstairs playing the piano rather than downstairs sewing). David Ryall as a footman, Fenella Woolgar as Lady Eastlake, James Norton playing the clarinet badly, Simon Chandler as Sir SomebodyorOther, Sinead Matthews as Queen Victoria. And so it went. Leigh also captures the slow changes in technologies. from travel in coaches, to steamboats to the new railway. We see Turner from early middle age to old age, the film moves from from the time his father comes to live with him, then dies, until Turner’s own death.
He is far from idealized. He is probably made far more inarticulate than the real Turner was – though every once in a while Spall comes out with a concise statement about art in general and his own. While Turner is tenderly loving to his father, we see that he left his wife or a woman who regards herself as his wife (played by an actress who has been with Leigh since High Hopes, Ruth Sheen) and does not help his daughters or grandchildren at all. The really poignant figure of the film is his woman servant, Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson), who serves him endlessly from dawn to dusk, whom he fucks and buggers at will and never shows an iota of respect to.
Half way through the film he marries Mrs Booth a middle class woman running a lodging house at Margate afer her second husband dies and we see he is all courtesy to her, gradually becomes friends, treats her well and when her second husband dies, courts and then gently takes her to bed, respecting and living with her as a husband; they are congenial. She sells her house and moves to Margate which is near the sea to accommodate his painting habits.
The penultimate scene of the movie is of this ex-boarding house lady after she sees Turner though his death (thus she is widowed three times) washing a window and looking out at the sky remembering Turner saying “The Sun is God.” She is a cheerful woman, one reason Turner stays by her. But the movie ends on Hannah, aged, ugly, worn, finding the house her master goes to for weeks, and realizing he has been living with this other woman. She is too mortified to come in. She is last seen after his death, a shattered servant wandering about his house, about to be thrown out – -grieving for him. He never treated her decently because of her class. The movie presents him at the moment of death remembering her (he utters his pet name for her, “damsel”) — softening what is very hard.
There are many vignettes slices of life of the time. Among the last scenes is that of a beggar-woman prostitute lying dead in a pool by the gutter, probably a suicide. The authorities cover her with a blanket. There are also concerts and drawing room eating and drinking and conversation abut scenes of working people in the streets. These juxtapositions reminded me of High Hopes and I thought I’d rent that one again.
The movie made me ask the question, what is a historical film? Was I enjoying it because it was so self-reflexively a costume-drama well done with many of my favorite actors? Maybe because it did move so slowly — and the scenes of conversation moved so deliciously normatively (none of this 5 second vignette coming to a melodramatic climax and then move on), it felt real enough? Or was it seemingly authentic decor? Period costume, antique furniture, other props? How does one convey history? because in a way this was pastiche. Was it the the sense of space that was presented naturalistically? In fact some of the scenes where Turner goes off to paint seemed to me frozen concoctions (CGE) based on paintings I’d seen in books. A crowded fore- and background and then the scene with the moving camera work at various angles like our eyes? or the acting? it moves naturalistically and often it seems that nothing much is happening except of course our attention is held by small events.
For those who love Turner it’s a feast as we do glimpse many of his paintings and are reminded of others.
An engraving of Lancaster Sands
Richmond, Yorkshire Moors, 1828
Some reviews: Mark Kermode, the Guardian; Sarah Turner of Popinsomaniac‘ Roberta Smith, an art critic in the NYTimes
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
From the review by Barrell:
After three or four hours in the Linbury Galleries at Tate Britain, examining, admiring, taking notes on the Late Turner exhibition (until 25 January), I wandered into the café to take the weight off my feet and to read the reviews I had downloaded from the exhibition website on my tablet. I had been careful not to read them until after my visit, but now I wanted to see if I could use them to get me started on my own review. The first one I read half-persuaded me that I was just too leaden-eyed, leaden-headed to appreciate late Turner, not at all the right person to be writing this review. ‘Out of the ashes of this Götterdämmerung,’ wrote the scourge of the poppies, Jonathan Jones, of his own exit from the exhibition, ‘I crawled away exhausted, wrecked, into the empty light of the modern world.’ Wow. That is some reaction. After all that mundane examining, admiring, taking notes, I was a touch exhausted myself, but wrecked? I hung my head, dropped my shoulders and tried to feel wrecked. ‘Are you all right?’ a kind lady at the next table asked. I had to admit I was. But what of Jones? Would he recover? How long would it take?
Not long, as it turned out. Over the next four days, wrecked as he was, he managed to write another seven articles and reviews, and over the next month, though exhausted, he kept close to this rate of production, averaging one piece a day. Not for the first time I wondered if he was perhaps guilty of overwriting, in more senses than one. But he was not the only critic to claim to have been physically impaired when confronted by late Turner, or disappointed by the relative colourlessness of the world out in the street compared with the feast of colour in the gallery. ‘Emerging from Turner’s heliocentric cathedral,’ Peter Conrad wrote in the Observer, ‘I felt I had cataracts: it takes time to re-accustom your dazzled eyes to the wan, monochrome mock-up we call reality.’
Turner, and his great advocate Ruskin, would surely have sighed with impatience at these reactions. ‘Always remember,’ Turner advised a young painter, ‘you can never reach the brilliancy of nature’ – however monochrome, empty, nature seems to be. ‘There is no climate, no place, and scarcely an hour,’ Ruskin declared, ‘in which nature does not exhibit colour which no mortal effort can imitate or approach.’ I am being pedantic, I suppose, in taking so literally what Jones and Conrad intended merely as evocative fine writing, or perhaps were hoping might be read as a statement about the moral emptiness of reality and modernity. But where the artist is Turner, and the topic is light, about which he thought with such precision, to use hyperbole like this is surely to miss the point.
Missing the point of Turner, and how for half a century critics have been doing just that, is what this exhibition is about. In a superb introductory essay in the catalogue, Sam Smiles questions what has become a much repeated and unhelpful notion about Turner’s last works, a notion that has been seen as ‘righting a great wrong’. It presumes that in his last years, aware of how little time was left to him, Turner at last painted for his own satisfaction, not for that of the public or of his patrons. He now creates ‘valedictory works that are far beyond his contemporaries’ understanding but look forward to posthumous vindication in a world finally ready to accept them’. Only when ‘the tide of modern art had flooded in’ were we able to see that these late works anticipated Impressionism and even abstraction. ‘Turner, on this analysis, is an exceptional artist not merely because of his high ability and the production of so many outstanding paintings throughout his professional career, but because those pictures he painted in the later 1830s and 1840s break the bonds of time and history to which lesser artists submit.’ Painting set free.
That phrase, the subtitle of this exhibition, was Lawrence Gowing’s, who about fifty years ago came up with the claim that Turner was the first modern artist, perhaps the first abstract expressionist. His view of Turner was based on the recovery of works left rolled up in his studio when he died, kept in storage since his death and regarded as unfinished. These now came to be discussed as if they were finished works, or as if it didn’t matter whether they were finished or not. And of course in one sense it doesn’t. Arguably, none of Turner’s oil paintings should be thought of as finished, except provisionally; as long as they were within reach, they were works in progress, open to indefinite revision. But to reinvent Turner as a modern artist by liberating from storage works he had not thought ready for exhibition, not ready even to be sent to the Academy to be licked into shape on Varnishing Day, is like publishing a writer’s notes for a future novel and claiming they represent a new genre of fiction. It has also had the consequence, Smiles writes, ‘that any serious concern with the subjects and meanings of Turner’s pictures has been set aside to concentrate instead on those aspects of form and composition that seem to presage modern painting’.
Our understanding of Turner, Smiles argues (and it is odd that it needs arguing at all), should start from the fact that his late works were painted anything up to 180 years ago, in the early Victorian period, and addressed to an early Victorian audience. He was an artist fully engaged in his time, anxious to communicate what he believed were important truths about the (then) modern world, but anxious too to sell work and to attract new commissions. His subject matter was not chosen as particularly suitable for formal experiments in abstraction: in his late works ‘he continued to explore visual perception, natural phenomena, modern life, the course of history and the social and ethical contexts that determine the endeavours of mankind’. In short, he was very much attuned to the mid-19th century world, to its economic and technological development, to its concerns with the lessons of history and the nation’s future prospects, to its debates about the contribution of art to civil society and to reflections on the nature of painting.
There was nothing in his interest in social, cultural, ethical questions that he needed to be liberated from, that inhibited his commitment to the art of painting, to ‘handling oil paint and watercolour freely and using the resources of light and colour to choreograph the pictorial structure of his work’. On the contrary, it was the great range of his interest in, and his concern for, the time he lived in that prompted and promoted his ceaseless experimentation with the language of painting ….
One of the most remarkable things about Turner’s last works is how enthusiastically they engaged with the mid-19th century, its technological and economic developments, and how his painting developed in the effort to represent them. Some of the most famous examples are absent from this exhibition: Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, painted to demonstrate the contrast between sunny, indolent Venice and the dark industriousness of modern Tyneside; The Fighting ‘Temeraire’, the great image of the decline of Britain’s mercantile power and of the age of sail giving way to the age of steam, as the great wooden ship is towed up the Thames to the breakers by a squat paddle-driven tug vomiting thick smoke from its iron funnel. But three of the four paintings of whaling are here, with sketches to accompany them, a perfect subject for Turner, both maritime and industrial, and so are the sublime Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth and Rain, Steam and Speed – the Great Western Railway.
This last painting was the subject of a brilliant review by Thackeray, who, Victorian novelist though he was, was one of the best of Turner’s contemporary critics, with a much sharper sense of Turner’s achievement than many of the reviewers of this exhibition. For him, Turner’s engagement with the modern world and his experiments and innovations in painting were inseparable. He had no notion of ‘painting for painting’s sake’ and no interest in the subject matter as something distinct from the painting of it. Turner, he wrote, ‘has out-prodigied almost all former prodigies’.
He has made a picture with real rain, behind which is real sunshine, and you expect a rainbow every minute. Meanwhile, there comes a train down at you, really moving at the rate of fifty miles an hour, and which the reader had best make haste to see, lest it should dash out of the picture, and be away up Charing Cross through the wall opposite. All these wonders are performed with means not less wonderful than the effects are. The rain … is composed of dabs of dirty putty slapped on to the canvas with a trowel; the sunshine scintillates out of very thick, smeary lumps of chrome yellow. The shadows are produced by cool tones of crimson lake and quiet glazings of vermilion. Although the fire in the steam engine looks as if it were red, I am not prepared to say that it is not painted with cobalt and pea-green. And as for the manner in which the ‘Speed’ is done, of that the less said the better – only it is a positive fact that there is a steamcoach going fifty miles an hour. The world has never seen anything like this picture.
This is wonderful stuff: the care with which Thackeray has looked at the painting and the excitement of his response to it; the awe with which he describes the vast speed of this great invention, and his fascination with the means Turner has invented to represent it; the rough new language of painting Thackeray himself has had to invent to describe what Turner is doing (‘dirty putty’, ‘slapped’, ‘smeary lumps’) juxtaposed with the old poetic language of polite criticism (‘cool tones’, ‘quiet glazings’) so precisely catching the combination of traditional, painstaking skill and almost reckless innovation that characterises Turner’s late style. Above all, his certainty that he has seen on the walls of the Academy something breathtakingly new. He won’t have to wait for the tide of modern art to flood in to appreciate what Turner has done. It’s 1844, and he’s got it. Turner is not out of his time: he and Thackeray are contemporaries.
It is perhaps the great sunrise landscapes of the mid-1840s – oils that seem to mimic watercolours in everything but their size, and that have become so familiar from the Turner rooms at Tate Britain – that the notion of Turner as a modern painter, as an abstract expressionist, clings to most tenaciously. Four of them, all now regarded as some way from being finished, are hanging together in one room, including Norham Castle, Sunrise, which, Brown writes, has been ‘a touchstone for modern understandings of Turner’s later work as abstract or impressionist, as if he could knowingly “anticipate” later artistic trends. These are bold claims to make when we cannot know if Turner finished working on it or expected an audience for it at all.’ Of the landscapes in this manner, I have always been especially attracted to Sunrise, a Castle on a Bay: ‘Solitude’ and I have stuck to this preference in spite of what has been described as its rough and clumsy handling. ‘At its most sublime,’ Conrad writes, painting ‘is the art in which sight is intensified and ignited so that it becomes a kind of supernatural vision.’ For years I have had this painting hooked up in my mind with the passionate lines from ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, written as if at sunset, in which Coleridge conjures the landscape to intensify, to ignite itself, for the benefit of his friend Charles Lamb:
richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.
In the picture as well as the poem, or so I like to think, the landscape is imagined as becoming ‘less gross than bodily’, dematerialised, ethereal, a translucent veil which, while it conceals the deity, figured as the sun, at the same time reveals the divine presence. The semi-transparent trees in the picture are matched in the poem by the lime, a walnut-tree, a line of elms, all of which both hide and either admit or reflect the evening sun. The notion of nature as simultaneously veiling and revealing the deity was as alive in the mid-19th century as it seems to be dead now. We don’t now read Turner primarily as a religious painter, but his imagination and intellect were so shaped and penetrated by the natural religion of the Romantic and early Victorian age that whatever his religious beliefs it is not hard to believe the story that his dying words were ‘The sun is God.’ As much as his paintings of technological progress, these sunrises, and the transparent landscape watercolours so generously represented in this wonderful exhibition, are images that speak to our time from Turner’s own, though we may be less willing to hear them.
Thanks for this post. I saw “Mr. Turner” this week and enjoyed it hugely. Such a visual feast! Movies usually disappoint me by not being like books, but this one is a reminder of how magical film can really be.
Paul N: “I always (well, almost always) enjoy Mike Leigh’s films, and I especially liked his last excursion into Victoriana–TOPSY-TURVY–so I’m looking forward to this …”
I appreciate Paul’s comment because it reminded (quite why I can’t say) that I omitted a central implication of Spall-as-Turner. He may have wanted a financial success (for obvious reasons) and we see him going about in society and at the museum opening to achieve that, but he does not buy into his hierarchical society’s values at all. Look who he marries. He sits there silent most of the time because most of the time he doesn’t agree or thinks what is being said silly (he grunts this out at one point). His behavior to those beneath him (especially his housemaid) is bad but the feel of the performance is of someone outside looking in or outside and painting it. One of my favorite Leigh films is Another Year: